A Strange Yet Familiar Place
by Roving Otter
Summary: After being shot, Walt wakes up in his old house, his injuries mysteriously healed. There, he meets someone he thought he'd never see again. Takes place after Felina.
1. Chapter 1

Been awhile since I've been bitten by the fanfic bug, but I just finished watching Breaking Bad, and...well, here goes.

This takes place after the final episode.

* * *

Walter White woke with a strangled gasp and lay, dazed and shivering, on the hard floor. He blinked the sting of sweat from his eyes and found himself staring up at a blank ceiling. Slowly, he sat up.

He recognized this place. It was his house—the house where he'd once lived with his family, in what now felt like another life. The living room was just as he'd last seen it: empty and lifeless, devoid of furniture, a skeleton of itself. The word HEISENBERG, sprayed across the wall in dripping yellow, was the only splash of color.

What was he doing here?

Memories flashed through his head. Bullets. Screams. Agony. The wail of police sirens. Darkness closing in around him. His hand flew to his stomach, to the place where he'd been shot. His palm came away clean, free of blood. There was no pain now; only a distant ache, like the ghost of an old wound. When he pulled up his shirt, there was nothing, not even a scar.

He had died. He _remembered_ it. Yet here he was.

The faint buzz of a fly reached his ears. He turned to see it sitting on the floor beside him—a huge, black housefly, washing itself with its forelegs. Its wings vibrated and twitched. Automatically, Walt smacked his hand down atop the fly. When he lifted his palm, there was nothing there. The buzz came again, from somewhere above him.

He drew in a deep breath…and doubled over in a coughing fit, muffling the sounds against one fist. The coughing lasted a long time, and it hurt, and it left him feeling drained and shaky. He flopped back down on the floor, trying to catch his breath. It was a few minutes before he gathered the strength to climb to his feet and walk over to the window.

The street outside was still and quiet, the sky a flat grayish-white. There was something very unnatural about that sky; it looked like it was made of paper, like he could punch a hole in it. The houses were all more-or-less as he remembered them, except they appeared slightly older, slightly shabbier, the lawns unkempt, the windows dark. No cars, no signs of life.

This was his house, his neighborhood, and yet it was…different. Wrong.

Steady, he thought. Breathe. Take stock. Gather information before drawing a conclusion.

Slowly, he walked through the empty rooms in his house, but saw nothing except a few stray pieces of trash crumpled in the corners. His gaze lingered on the baby's room, the spot where Holly's crib once stood.

His heart twisted in his chest, a sudden, sharp spasm. He turned away.

His pulse drummed in his throat as he looked out the window, at the backyard pool...which was, oddly enough, filled with chlorine-blue water, the only color in sight. Everything else seemed faded, bleached out. A world in grayscale.

The faucets in the bathrooms and kitchen didn't work, so he walked outside, knelt beside the pool, scooped up some water and drank from his cupped hands.

And then he noticed—he couldn't smell the chlorine at all. Unease flickered inside him. He gathered up a handful of his dirty, sweat-stained clothes, held them to his nose, and inhaled. No odor. His sense of smell was completely absent.

The sense of unease deepened and chills wormed their way under his skin. None of this made sense.

Maybe he was still dying. Maybe this was a hallucination, a few fleeting dreams before the final darkness closed in. But he didn't really believe that. This was too detailed, too fully realized to be a dream.

He walked back through the house, out through his front door, and surveyed the street. It seemed to fade into nothingness at the edges, details blurring into a white mist.

"Hello?" he called out. His voice echoed in the stillness. "Can anyone hear me?"

No answer.

He began to walk. A few times, he stopped to knock on doors, but no one answered. When he peered in through windows, the houses all appeared just as bare and deserted as his own.

He kept walking until the mist around him thickened, and he was walking through solid white. Still, he pushed forward. The mist was cold and clammy against his skin, like damp fleece. It blotted out the sky, the pavement, until there was nothing but a sea of mist. He kept one arm outstretched in front of him, waving blindly to prevent himself from running into anything.

Finally, the mist thinned. He stepped out into clear air…and found himself in front of his own house again. For a moment, he could only stand, staring, his jaw hanging slack. "This is impossible," he muttered.

He turned and walked in a different direction, and the mist swallowed him once more. Again, when the mists cleared, he emerged back into his front yard. No matter which way he walked, he found himself returning to the same spot. His mind raced wildly, trying to make sense of it. This place was an endless loop, a snake eating its own tail. It was nonsensical, a physical conundrum. Yet it existed.

He dug his thumbnail into his palm, hard enough to hurt. "Wake up," he hissed at himself. " _Wake up, dammit._ "

The scenery remained unaltered.

Dazed, he trudged across the street and sat down on his front steps. Another deep, racking fit of coughing seized him. It lasted for almost a full minute. When it was over, he slumped, eyes closed, waiting for the dizziness to subside.

Maybe he should keep exploring. He could break into one of the other houses, see if it had a working phone, a way to contact someone outside this bubble in space-time, or whatever it was. But he was just so…tired. So damn tired. He lay down, cheek pressed to the cool concrete. Beneath the exhaustion, he felt a deep and steadily growing terror, like a void in the center of his chest. "Where am I?" he whispered.

* * *

Time passed. How long, Walt didn't know; the clocks here didn't work. The sky darkened and brightened, but there were no stars. For that matter, there didn't seem to be any sun. The light was gray and diffuse, emanating from everywhere and nowhere.

His investigations confirmed that none of the other houses contained working phones. Or working televisions or computers, for that matter. He was alone.

Strangely, he felt no hunger, which was just as well, because there was no food. He slept on the living room floor whenever exhaustion overcame him, but he never woke up feeling rested. Sleep was simply a brief gap in his consciousness, like a line of text neatly inked out. It brought no feeling of refreshment or renewal.

The fly still buzzed around his house, sometimes close and loud, sometimes so faint he could hardly hear it, but always there—it seemed to be the only other living thing in this place. Occasionally he chased it around, more for sport than because he actually expected to catch it (which he never did). It was just a game to relieve the boredom, which had quickly become the most salient fact of his existence: constant, unending, oppressive, and utterly intolerable.

It was becoming harder and harder to deny what, deep down, he had known since the moment he woke up. He was already dead.

He stood beside his pool, staring into its shimmering blue depths.

So, Walt thought wearily, this was his eternal fate. This was hell. Not a flaming pit, but a gray, empty, pointless existence in a lonely world filled with reminders of the family he had lost. He had to admit, it seemed like a fitting punishment.

He laughed, a hoarse, slightly crazed sound. The laughter broke off into another coughing fit. It went on and on until he thought he'd cough up his lungs. Finally, it tapered off, leaving him empty and sore and aching. Maybe he would have cancer for the rest of eternity too. Always dying, never dead. No Skyler to wipe his brow with a cold cloth, to lay a blanket over him when he woke up disoriented on the bathroom floor. She had always been there, long after anyone else would have deserted him. And now, even she was gone. He would never see her face, never hear her voice again.

He would never hear anyone's voice again.

* * *

More time passed, sliding by in slippery chunks, difficult to define or pin down.

He went for aimless walks. Sometimes, he thought he felt eyes watching him from the windows of the empty houses, but when he looked, there was no one there.

Occasionally he raged, pacing, shaking his fists and screaming like a madman at the sky. Sometimes he wept. Once or twice, when he was feeling particularly desperate, he even got down on his knees and prayed for forgiveness. No one answered, and afterward, he felt absurd—as if he had walked up to a telephone pole and asked it to do is income taxes.

If there was a God, even He couldn't hear Walt's voice here.

Because there was nothing else to occupy himself with, Walt spent most of his time inside his own memories, replaying the good times with Skyler and Walt Junior.

He missed their voices—Skyler's gentle, warm alto, Junior's clear tenor, broken and halting—the way he took pains to enunciate his words in a way that always made Walt feel somehow both protective and proud. And Holly. Little Holly, so tender and soft it had sometimes seemed impossible that anything so pure could exist.

He remembered his fiftieth birthday, the day he first learned his cancer diagnosis and everything changed.

Back then, he had been a small man, an unimportant man, frustrated and resentful toward a world which refused to acknowledge him. He'd kept his anger hidden, always simmering beneath the surface, because there was nothing he could do to change his reality. But he'd had his family. Their love, their trust, so real and essential, like air—something you didn't notice or appreciate until it was gone. And Walt had broken that trust with his own two hands.

He thought about Jesse Pinkman, too. Jesse had been many things to him; his protege, his partner, his friend, and then his enemy. The last time Walt had seen him, he'd been a broken man, scruffy and disheveled, blue eyes staring out through a fog of despair. After being held prisoner in that horrible compound for so long, he'd no doubt have some deep psychological scars. But Jesse was alive, at least. He was free.

Walt wondered what he was doing now. He hoped Jesse hadn't slipped back into his old habits and started using again. Maybe he'd learned from his mistakes. Maybe, finally, he would make a decent life for himself. After everything he'd been through, he's earned a bit of peace.

He walked numbly down the street, hands in his pockets. He'd lost count of how many hundreds of times he'd crossed the length of his tiny world. How many more thousands, how many more millions, billions of times would he take this same walk? How long before his sanity completely dissolved?

This was what he deserved, he reminded himself. No more, no less.

At least he had left his family some money, even if they would never know it had come from him. That was what he'd set out to do, wasn't it? That was why he started cooking meth in the first place.

Of course, he'd enjoyed it, too. Despite all the pain, the terror, and the horrors he had committed, he had tasted for a brief while what it meant to truly _live_. He had been a wild animal, a king on a throne of crystal blue, a god of blood and gunsmoke and chemistry.

And he'd left a trail of shattered lives and corpses behind him. Hank. Jane. Gale. Mike. All the countless others who had died because of his arrogance. And—

He stopped.

Ahead of him, a figure in a black hoodie sat motionless on the front steps of the house next to his. Walt blinked a few times. No. It couldn't be.

...could it?

The figure's head turned slowly toward him. Walt stared into blank, red-rimmed blue eyes.

"Hey, Mr. White."

-To be continued


	2. Chapter 2

For a few seconds, Walt couldn't find the words to respond. He just stared, taking in that familiar face, now clean-shaven and unscarred. Jesse's hair was shorter than he'd last seen it. He looked the way he had when they'd first started cooking together…all except his eyes.

"Jesse?" he whispered. He was afraid to believe it, half-convinced that Jesse would vanish like a mirage the next time he blinked. Why was he here? _How?_ Was this a hallucination? Was his mind already unraveling? "Is—is that you?"

Jesse rolled his eyes. "No, it's Britney Spears."

There was no mistaking that sarcastic tone. It was Jesse Pinkman, in the flesh. Walt's head spun.

Jesse turned his head away as if Walt's presence were of no consequence. He pulled a pack of cigarettes and a lighter from the pocket of his hoodie and flicked the lighter a few times with his thumb. No flame. "Don't know why I bother to keep trying," he said. "It doesn't work. Nothing works."

"Jesse…what are you doing here?"

"I could ask you the same question, bitch. But I think we both know the answer." Jesse shoved the cigarettes and lighter back into his pockets. "Once, you told me that both of us were going to hell. Do you remember? Well, I guess you were right. Congrats. You called it."

"No," Walt said. "You're not dead. You survived. You were _free_. The last time I saw you, you were driving away."

He looked away. "Yeah, well." His jaw tightened. "That was a year ago, maybe more. I started using again. Guess I overdosed."

"Overdosed," Walt heard himself repeat. His own voice sounded faraway—flat, like a recording. He was still trying to convince his brain that Jesse was real. He'd been alone for far too long.

"Yeah. On heroin. Or at least, I think it was an OD. I don't really remember. Maybe I choked on my own vomit, like Jane." A muscle in his jaw tightened. "You remember Jane, right?"

A vision flashed through his head: wide, blank eyes, a sheet-pale face, vomit bubbling up from her lips as she asphyxiated. "Yes. I remember Jane." He pushed the image away. There were other, more immediate issues to deal with.

This still didn't make sense. The chronology didn't line up. Surely, Walt hadn't been here an entire _year._ Had he? Maybe it didn't matter. There was no reason to assume that this place followed the normal rules of time and space.

Walt ran his palm slowly over his face and took a deep breath, trying to clear his head, to ignore the cacophony of confused emotions swirling through him. Thoughts shuffled rapidly through his mind.

This…this was wrong. Even if Jesse was dead, he wasn't supposed to be _here_. He'd made some mistakes, but speaking in relative terms, he'd been an innocent victim caught up in Walt's schemes. Before they started working together, Jesse had been a small-time dealer. Walt was the one who'd dragged him into the world of high-level, organized crime. If not for him, Jesse would probably have washed his hands of the whole sorry business long ago. Who knows. He might have cleaned up, gotten a respectable job and raised a family.

Or not. In all likelihood, he would have continued along his path, chasing addiction after addiction, drowning himself in music and video games and sex until he either ended up in prison or fried his brain with chemicals. Still, Walt had exposed Jesse to levels of horror that neither of them previously could have imagined. Without him, Jesse wouldn't have had to kill anyone, or to watch people—watch _children—_ die.

In light of that, it seemed terribly unfair that he and Jesse were suffering the exact same punishment. Was the universe really so cruel?

Unless…

Maybe this wasn't what he'd assumed. Maybe he needed to reassess.

"All right," he murmured. "All right, let's just stop and think."

"Think about _what_? Don't you get it? It's over. This is _it._ There's nothing to think about."

Without meaning to, he found himself sliding into the same tone he'd once used for his chemistry lectures. "You said we're in hell. What makes you assume that?"

Jesse squinted. "Uh. Because we're dead, and we were both really shitty people? What, you believe in all that 'God forgives' bullshit? I wouldn't forgive me, if I were Him. Seems kinda obvious that this isn't heaven, so."

"The answer which _seems_ most obvious isn't always correct." Walt began to pace, gesturing as if he were in front of a class of students. "All right, so we both remember dying. And this place doesn't appear to follow the ordinary rules of physics, which would suggest we're not on Earth. But there are a wide array of other possibilities."

Jesse was staring at him with an expression halfway between astonishment and disgust.

Walt didn't stop. The words spilled out of him now, gathering momentum: "Let's say, hypothetically, that it were possible to go back in time, download the contents of a human brain at the moment of death, and upload it into some kind of mainframe. This could be a simulation. We may actually be in the far future, when such technology has been developed—"

"So you think—what? Aliens are playing around with our brains for shits and giggles?"

"I didn't say aliens. It could be anything. I'm just saying, it's not outside the realm of possibility. We could be inside a matrix."

"Mr. White," Jesse said, deadpan, "I realize I'm not the world's smartest guy, but that is fucking retarded."

"I'm just proposing an alternative hypothesis. It seems just as likely as the idea that some angry deity decided to lock us in a cage and torment us for the rest of eternity. And even if you're correct and this is hell, which hell is it?"

He squinted. "Huh?"

"Is this the Judeo-Christian hell? I see no reason to assume that, apart from the arbitrary fact that we were both born in a geographical region where Christianity is the dominant religion. And even if we assume that this hell has some basis in Christian theology, there are several different words in the original Hebrew version of the Bible which are translated as 'hell,' and all of them have very different meanings, so which one are we talking about? First of all—"

Jesse groaned and buried his face in his hands. "Jesus. You haven't changed. Why am I even listening to you? You are the most full-of-shit person I've ever met."

"I'm just making a point here. We don't understand our current situation. It would be premature to assume—"

"You can't think your way out of this one," Jesse said flatly. "Don't even try."

"Well, what do you suggest I should do?" He heard a hint of the old exasperation creeping into his voice; Jesse always brought that out of him. "Curl up in a ball and whimper? Abandon all hope and sulk in the corner for the rest of eternity? 'Oooh, no, I'm in hell!' What good would that do, I ask you?"

Jesse closed his eyes and massaged his temples.

"The way I see it," Walt continued, "we have two options. We can sit around feeling sorry for ourselves. Or we can keep trying, keep thinking, and maybe work toward getting out."

"Do you even hear yourself?" he shouted. " _Getting out?_ You think we can just hop on a Greyhound bus? You think you're gonna find a loophole in the system?"

"We won't know until we try."

Jesse laughed, a hollow sound. "We just need a can-do attitude, right? We just need to _apply_ ourselves." He smiled—or rather, bared his teeth. "I have to hand it to the Big Guy. Being stuck here with _you,_ having to listen to your bullshit for the rest of eternity? Couldn't have come up with a worse punishment myself. But hey, at least I know you'll be just as miserable as I am. I guess there is some justice in the universe, after all."

Walt stared into those dead blue eyes. He thought about the Jesse Pinkman he'd once known—affable, foolish, exuberant, curiously gentle at times, and so very _human—_ and compared the image to the bitter, broken man in front of him.

Walt felt suddenly tired, and helpless, and very old. "I know you hate me, Jesse. Do you think I don't know that?"

"Hate?" He laughed, a hollow sound. "No. That's not a strong enough word. Everyone I loved, everything I ever cared about, you destroyed." His smile had vanished; his face was a hard, rigid mask. "You think saving me from those neo-Nazi scumbags made up for anything? You're the reason I was there in the first place."

"I know." Walt's voice was low, subdued. "And I am truly sorry. Being here, in this place—I've had time to rethink a lot of things. I made some terrible mistakes. Things I wish desperately that I could take back. I know you've suffered—"

"No. You don't. You don't know the first fucking thing about what I went through. They kept me chained in a pit, like an animal. I ate there, I slept there. The only time they ever let me out was when they needed me to cook. They beat me. They _tortured_ me." His voice cracked. "And every night, _every fucking night_ I was in that place, I woke up screaming from dreams of watching Jane die, watching Andrea and Brock die, watching that kid on the bike die, over and over and over again. You want to know why I can accept where we are and you can't? Because I've had plenty of practice. I already know what hell is like. And there's no getting out."

Walt opened his mouth, but no words came. His chest ached.

"Don't," Jesse said. "Don't you fucking look at me like that."

"Like what?"

"Like you _care._ " He spat the word. "You don't care about me. You never did. All you ever did was use me, and I kept crawling back for more, like some battered wife. Well, I'm done with that. It took me way too fucking long to wake up, but I know who you really are now, and I'm not letting you fool me again."

Walt drew in a shaky breath through his nose and let it out through his mouth. He closed his eyes, collecting himself, then spoke in a slow, measured tone. "Yes. You're right about me...about everything. I was selfish and arrogant, and I hurt you and many other people. I'm a monster." It felt strangely liberating, to speak the words out loud. "But as you said, there _is_ some justice in the universe, because I ruined my own life as well. My family despises me. The last time I spoke to my son, he told me that he hated me and that I should just die already."

Jesse narrowed his eyes. "If you expect me to feel sorry for you—"

"I don't. But you're wrong about one thing, Jesse. You said I never cared about you. That isn't true."

Jesse's shoulders stiffened. "Fuck you," he spat. "You put a _hit_ out on me."

Walt opened his mouth instinctively to defend his actions, to remind Jesse that he had nearly set Walt's house on fire, then betrayed Walt by working with the DEA. At the time, getting rid of Jesse had seemed like the only way to protect himself and his family, even if the idea had torn him up inside. But excuses seemed pointless, now. He closed his mouth. "Yes. I did."

"So you're not gonna deny it, huh? Then admit you never gave a shit about me. Have the balls to do that much, at least."

Walt didn't respond.

Jesse stalked toward him, seized the front of his shirt, and yanked him forward until their faces were inches apart. "Admit it."

Walt stared into bloodshot blue eyes. "Jesse. Listen to me." His voice was soft, frantic. "You don't belong in this place. You're not a monster like me. When I woke up here, I assumed the same thing you did. But if _you're_ here, then maybe we're wrong. Maybe it's something else, maybe there's a way out for you. If you let me help you—"

Jesse's fist filled his vision, then red stars exploded across the backs of his eyes, and he was reeling, staggering backwards and cradling the side of his face, which throbbed. The world spun, ground and sky wheeling past his vision.

Jesse launched himself at Walt, roaring, fist cocked. Walt instinctively started to bring his arms up, to block the next blow. Then he lowered them and took the punch. Pain burst through his nose. He landed on his back on the ground. Sharp rocks dug into his spine as Jesse came down on top of him, fists swinging, screaming as he hit Walt again and again.

Walt took it. He went limp, surrendered, accepted the pain. The blows rained down, knocking his head back and forth, mashing his lips against his teeth. The hot, salty taste of blood filled his mouth. Jesse kept screaming, kept hitting him, until the screams turned to sobs, and the blows slowed down and then stopped. Walt lay motionless, listening to him cry. He couldn't see anything; his eyes had swollen shut. Warm drops of water fell on his face. "Why?" Jesse whispered. "Why don't you fight back?"

Walt spoke through swollen, bleeding lips. "I'm done fighting."

Jesse's weight lifted off him. Walt managed to open one eye a crack and peered out through the slit. Jesse sat, huddled in a ball, still crying in small, shuddering sobs. Walt started to reach out to him. He flinched away, and Walt pulled his arm back.

His head ached and pulsed. He wondered if it was possible to get a traumatic brain injury after you were already dead. His vision blurred, and for a time—it might have been seconds or hours—he floated in a murky swamp of half-formed dreams.

In one dream, he was teaching a child to ride a bicycle—a small, dark-haired, blue-eyed boy who was somehow both Jesse and Junior. The boy fell off and skinned his knee and started to cry, and Walt picked him up and held him and told him that it was okay, that scrapes healed.

But no matter what he said or did, the boy's tears wouldn't stop. And when he looked down, he saw it wasn't a scrape after all, but a deep wound, and there was blood everywhere; soaking his clothes, pooling on the street. Panic crept over him.

Because the truth was that it wasn't okay. Some injuries never healed.

* * *

Once he recovered his senses, Walt picked himself up off the ground. His legs nearly gave out under him, and he leaned against the nearest wall, steadying himself. His body was a collection of throbbing aches, and Jesse was nowhere to be seen. "Jesse?" he called. No answer.

Walt started to call out again, but his voice caught, and he dissolved into a coughing fit. A thin dribble of blood-tinged bile ran from his mouth, and he wiped it away with his sleeve. Wheezing, he limped up to Jesse's house and knocked on the door. "Are you there?"

No answer. But he heard the rustle of movement from inside.

He knocked again. "Can we talk?"

"Fuck you." His voice was hoarse and faint. "Just go away. Leave me alone. I never want to see you again."

A retort sprang to Walt's lips— _That's going to be difficult, considering we're the only two people in a universe which is apparently only half a mile in diameter—_ but he choked it back.

He retreated back into his home—or what was left of it—and sat on the floor. The buzzing of a fly filled his ears. Endless, monotone, maddening. This time, he didn't bother trying to hunt it down.

Instead, he thought about Jesse.

He was, of course, entirely correct to hate and mistrust Walt. From the very beginning of their relationship, Walt had used him. He'd needed Jesse's connections in the business, and after that, he'd needed someone to rely on, someone he could trust, who would carry out his orders. Jesse filled that role.

He wondered, now, why the young man had followed him for so long. Walt certainly hadn't done anything to earn his loyalty. He'd simply taken advantage of it...of him. Along the way, Walt _had_ grown to care about him. In a sense, he'd become closer to Jesse than anyone, even his own family...but that hadn't stopped him from abandoning his partner in the end.

The dull burn of shame filled him. He pushed it aside. Shame wouldn't help either one of them now. Observe, think, decide on the best course of action, and act. That was Walt's way. He couldn't undo the things he had done, but maybe he could do _something._ Maybe there was still hope—if not for Walt, at least for Jesse.

He hunted around the house, searching for pens and paper. Finally, he found an old, dusty notebook buried in a corner of a dresser drawer in a corner of the bedroom, one of the few pieces of furniture that still existed. A few more minutes of hunting yielded a ballpoint pen, which he found on the floor under the dresser.

He sat at the kitchen table and began to write.

 _Jesse,_

 _I understand why you don't want to talk to me. I don't expect your forgiveness, and I won't ask for it. But I want to help you. I truly believe it's possible for you to get out of this place._

 _I have no ulterior motives. I realize that's difficult to believe, considering how I've acted in the past, but look at our situation. My family is gone forever. There's no money here, no means of cooking meth, and no one to sell to, even if we could. I have nothing else left to protect, and that means I have no reason to lie to you. Heisenberg is dead. I'm speaking to you as Walter White._

 _I won't approach you again. I will respect your wishes. But if you ever change your mind, if you ever want to talk, I'm here._

He folded up the paper, walked up to Jesse's house, and slid it under the front door.

A few minutes later, Jesse shoved it back out with the word ASSHOLE scrawled across the back in red pen.

* * *

Walt kept his promise. He didn't approach Jesse.

A few times, when he was out walking, he glimpsed him through the window of his house. Once, their eyes met. Jesse stared at him for a long moment, a strange, haunted expression on his face.

Walt raised one hand in a wave. Jesse gave him the finger and drew the curtains shut.

Walt sighed.

Later that day, he forced his way into one of the empty neighboring houses—the screen on the back door was loose, and with a stick and some effort, he was able to pry it up. He wandered the deserted rooms. This particular house had belonged to his neighbor Carol back in the land of the living, but there were no indications now of who had lived here, no pictures on the walls, no decorations.

The refrigerator, however, was mysteriously working, and inside he found a half-empty plastic bottle of soda. His heartbeat quickened. It had been so long since he'd tasted soda, or _anything,_ for that matter. It was probably flat, but he didn't care. He grabbed it and unscrewed the cap, his hand shaking with eagerness. When he took a swig, however, his stomach sank.

It was tasteless. Not just flat, but completely devoid of flavor. It might as well have been water…yet somehow, it didn't even quench his thirst. It was like drinking nothingness.

His sense of taste, too, was gone. Maybe he should have known.

He left the house, feeling dispirited. As he walked down the street, another fit of coughing seized him. He coughed until he blacked out, and he woke up sprawled on the lawn. Numbly, he picked himself up and wiped the blood from his lips.

He smelled chlorine.

It caught him off guard, because it was the first thing he'd smelled since he woke up in this place. He stopped, nostrils flaring. The smell was sharp, intense, awakening a sudden burst of memories—hot, lazy summer days, barbeques, laughter and talk, steaks sizzling.

It was coming from behind his own house, from the pool.

He walked into the backyard, gravel crunching under his shoes. The chlorinated blue was eerily bright, jewel-like. It danced and shimmered, throwing glints of light into Walt's eyes, making him squint. He walked closer and peered into the water. The pool seemed impossibly deep, like an optical illusion.

A pale form lay at the bottom, wearing nothing but a pair of boxers, eyes closed, motionless.

Jesse.

Fear jolted him like a bolt of electricity, and Walt's body reacted automatically. He jumped in and swam straight down…and down and down. The pool _was_ deeper than it had any right to be. Fifty feet? A hundred? His lungs started to ache, and his ears hurt from the pressure. But he kept swimming until finally, he reached the bottom.

Up close, Jesse's face was unnaturally white, his lips gray-blue, his expression serene, saint-like.

 _No, no, no._

Walt grabbed him and swam up, kicking out with strength and vigor he hadn't felt since his death. Above, light shimmered through the water. He swam until he broke the surface and gulped in huge, greedy lungfuls of air. Coughing, clothes dripping, he hauled himself over the concrete edge of the pool like a sea lion, dragging Jesse along with him. Still, Jesse didn't move.

"Jesse." Walt patted his cheek. _"Jesse!_ " He slapped him, rocking his head to one side. "Come on, come _on_." Walt rolled him onto his side, and his mouth fell open; water gushed out onto the pavement, but he still didn't move.

This wasn't possible. Jesse couldn't be _dead._ They were already dead.

Walt leaned down and pressed an ear to his chest. _There._ Faint, but unmistakable. A heartbeat. But he wasn't breathing.

He pinched Jesse's nose shut, opened his mouth, and leaned down.

Blue eyes flashed open. Jesse lunged upward, shoving Walt off him with both hands. He pushed himself up onto his elbows, leaned over, retched more water onto the pavement, and glared at Walt. "What the fuck, man?"

"Jesse. Oh, thank God. I—for a moment, I thought—"

"Look, I don't know what kinda vibe you think you've been pickin' up from me, but old nerdy drug lords aren't my type. Plus, I dunno if anyone's told you, but you have cancer-breath."

"I thought you were dying!" Walt snapped.

Jesse rolled his eyes. His color was already returning, his blue-gray lips going pink again. "Killing yourself doesn't work here. I tried it like ten times already. If you use a gun, it won't go off. If you hang yourself, the rope will break. If you slit your wrists, it won't bleed. We're stuck here."

Walt exhaled. His heart was still racing, but his fear had started to subside, a familiar frustration rising up to take its place. "If you already knew that, then what were you doing down there?"

"Back off, yo. I don't need to explain anything to you."

"This is my property."

He snorted. "Oh yeah. _Your property._ Why don't you sue me for trespassing, then?"

Walter forced himself to level his tone. This was the first time in days that Jesse had spoken to him. He didn't want to ruin it. "All right. Fine. I'm just asking—politely, out of simple curiosity—why you were laying at the bottom of my pool."

He hesitated, as if debating whether to respond...then shrugged. "I dunno. It's peaceful. Not breathing is a little weird at first, but you get used to it." His gaze wandered away. "If you stay under for long enough, things start to go fuzzy. You aren't asleep, but you're not really awake either. You just…float. It's a little like heroin." He sat, knees drawn up to his chest, arms wrapped around them. The posture made him look suddenly very young. "I feel safe down there."

"Well, you scared the hell out of me."

Jesse gave him a deadpan look. "Uh-huh. The guy who put a hit out on me was scared I might die."

"I see the irony. But nonetheless, I'm glad you're all right."

"Great. I'll go back in now, if it's all the same to you." But he didn't move. He remained sitting, huddled on the concrete.

"Is that really what you want?" Walt asked. "Just to drown yourself over and over?"

He rubbed a hand over his face. "I don't know what I want. Guess that was my whole problem, huh?" He looked up. The whites of his eyes were pinkish. Irritation from the chlorine or tears, Walt wasn't sure. "I'm weak."

"Jesse, you're not—"

"Don't."

Walt was silent for a moment, then pushed himself to his feet. He extended a hand.

Jesse's gaze flicked up briefly, then down again. He didn't take Walt's hand. But after a few seconds, he pushed himself to his feet and breathed a small, resigned sigh. "What do you want, anyway?"

"Just to talk."

"Your talking never did me any good before."

"What if I just listened, then?"

"I've got nothing to say to you."

"I find that hard to believe."

A bitter smile twitched across his lips. "You aren't gonna give up, are you? You always were a stubborn bastard." He rubbed the bridge of his nose. "Guess I can't avoid you forever. Hell, what's the point of trying? What's the point of anything, anymore?" He closed his eyes briefly.

Walt waited, holding his breath.

"Fine," Jesse muttered. "Fuck it. You wanna talk? We'll talk." He glanced at Walt's house. "Let's go to my place, though. Looks like there's not a lot left of yours."

"I appreciate this, Jesse. More than I can say."

"Whatever." He started to walk, still dripping pool water onto the concrete. Walt followed, a ball of tension in his chest. He'd been wanting to talk to Jesse all this time, but he didn't even know what they would say to each other. He had no theories about how to escape this metaphysical trap.

Still, it was a start. It was _something._ Here, in this desolate place, they had to cling to whatever bit of hope they could find.

-To be continued


	3. Chapter 3

"Make yourself at home, yo." Jesse was still wet from the pool, his brown hair darkened and slicked down with water, but his coloring had more or less returned to normal; that deathly whitish-blue pallor was gone.

Walt stepped in, looking around. The interior of Jesse's house looked more or less as he'd last seen it back in the land of the living. "The devil must like you," he said, trying for a lighthearted tone. "Compared to my place, this is a pretty nice setup."

Jesse squinted at him for a few seconds, then shrugged. "Whatever. I'm gonna get some dry clothes." He headed upstairs.

Walt sat in his armchair, looking around. The TV was on, though it buzzed with dead white static.

Jesse came down wearing faded jeans and a black, long-sleeved t-shirt. On the front was a design of a skull sticking its tongue out. He plopped down onto the couch and gave Walt one of those dead, flat looks. Walt had begun to recognize it as a mask. Beneath it, he suspected, Jesse was just as lost, confused, and terrified as he was.

"So," Walt said.

Jesse picked up a pack of cigarettes from the coffee table and placed one between his lips, though he didn't light it. "Yeah. So."

"I take it there's no cable here," Walt remarked, gesturing toward the TV.

"Like I said. Nothing works."

"What about the kitchen stove?"

"I dunno. Haven't tried it. What's the point? Food's got no taste. I don't even get hungry or thirsty anymore."

Walt raised his eyebrows. "So you actually have food?"

"A little. When I first woke up here, I tried eating some leftover pizza I found in the fridge. Tasted like cardboard. So I threw it out, made some coffee, toasted myself a slice of bread. It was like eating and drinking air. Can't smell anything, either."

"I've had the same issue. Curious, isn't it?"

"Yeah, I guess." Jesse aimed his thousand-yard-stare at the wall. The cigarette quivered a little between his teeth.

"Do you want something warm to drink?" Walt asked. "You were in that pool for a long time."

"Dude, don't ever bother—" He broke off, sighing, and ran his hands down his face. "Fine. Do what you want."

Walt went into the kitchen and rummaged through the cabinets until he found a box of instant hot chocolate. There was a half-gallon of milk in the fridge. He measured some into a pot, placed it on the stove, and turned on the burner. A bright blue flame flared to life.

So, not _everything_ here was broken.

Experimentally, he poured a bit of milk into a glass and drank it. Sure enough, there was no taste. There was ketchup in the refrigerator, as well; he squeezed a bit onto his finger and licked it off. Nothing.

He wondered if he should even bother with the hot chocolate. Since eating and drinking were neither necessary nor pleasurable here, it did seem a little silly, but there was something reassuring about going through the motions. He missed cooking. Both types. He felt useful, when he cooked; he felt necessary.

Walt watched the flame dance and sway. His gaze fixed on its center, where the blue turned to sharp, vibrant orange. Interesting, how the stove worked but cigarette lighters didn't. He wondered if it had occurred to Jesse that he could light his cigarettes on that stove. Or maybe, in keeping with the bizarre logic of this place, the flame refused to work only when used for certain purposes.

He tore open the packet and watched the powder dissolve into the milk. Experimentally, he leaned over the pot and sniffed. His sense of smell was still absent. The chlorine must have been a fluke.

No. It all meant _something,_ if only he could figure it out.

He poured the steaming, creamy brown mixture into a mug—Jesse's mugs were mismatched and faded, he noticed—brought it into the living room, and set it down on the coffee table. "There. It might not taste like anything, but it'll warm you up, at least."

Jesse's gaze flicked toward the mug. He picked it up, wrapping his hands around it, but didn't drink. "My mom used to make hot chocolate for me, when I was a kid. She'd put those little marshmallows in it. They'd get all soft and gooey and melt into the chocolate."

"Do you have any little marshmallows? I can put some in, if you like—"

"Stop trying so hard, man. I'm not angry at you. Not that I've forgiven you or anything. I just don't have the energy to be angry anymore." Still, he didn't drink, just clutched the mug. His fingers were tight around it, the skin around his nails white. "I don't care about anything."

"Are you okay, Jesse?" It was a stupid question. Of course he wasn't okay.

The muscles of his throat clenched as he swallowed. His gaze drifted out of focus. "I keep hearing their voices in my head. Jane's. Andrea's and Brock's. My parents. Even my little brother, Jake." His lips tightened in a bitter smile. "Wonder if Mom and Dad went to my funeral. Wonder if I even had one."

"They're your parents. Of course they went."

"Don't talk like you know them. You have no idea how many times I let them down."

"That doesn't matter, with family," Walt replied firmly. "That's what it means to _be_ family. No matter what happens, they're still there."

Jesse's gaze locked with his. "So what about your family, Mr. White?"

Walt lowered his head. A long silence stretched between them.

Jesse cleared his throat. "Hey…I, uh…"

"It's all right." He forced a smile, which faded quickly. "I take it you didn't see your folks again, after…after everything that happened."

He shook his head. "I just drove off. I barely remember what I did that whole year. Mostly, I drove around. I lost the house. Lived in a homeless shelter for awhile. But somehow I still found money for drugs. Guess that doesn't surprise you, does it? You once told me that without you around to keep me in line, I'd just start using again." The unlit cigarette slipped out from between his teeth and fell to the floor. "You were right. I had nothing left. Nothing real, anyway."

For a few seconds, Walt couldn't find his voice. He swallowed. "What about your friends? Skinny Pete and the other one, Beaver—"

"Badger."

"Badger. Sorry."

"I did go to them, at first. They lent me some money. But they were scared of me. I don't blame them. I was a mess."

"I thought…I thought you might go back to that girl. Andrea and her boy."

Jesse raised his head, brows knitting together. "You don't know?"

"Know what?"

Jesse's lips trembled. He pressed them together. "She died. She was killed. And I couldn't face Brock, not after…" His voice cracked. "It seemed like the best thing I could do for him was to stay away. I'd already fucked up his life enough. It's my fault she's gone, you know. They killed her to keep me in line. To keep me cooking."

"Jesse. I—I'm sorry." Walt's own voice sounded strange and disconnected, like a recording. A faint ringing filled his ears. "I had no idea."

"Doesn't matter now. Nothing matters." He stared down into his hot chocolate, which he still hadn't touched.

Walt looked at the downcast face, the slumped shoulders. It wasn't Jesse's fault that Andrea had been killed, he thought. It was Walt's. He had been responsible for the deaths of two women that Jesse loved.

Jesse looked straight at Walt, and there was no anger in his expression—just naked pain. "Why did you let her die?"

He didn't have to ask who he meant. "It's complicated."

"Just answer the fucking question."

Walt forced himself to meet Jesse's accusing gaze. "Because she was an addict, and so were you. If you had stayed with her, sooner or later you both would have been dead."

A look of disgust flashed across his face. "So you killed her for my own good? That's what you're saying?"

"Partly." He paused. "And also because I needed you, and things were simpler with her gone."

"So which is the real reason?"

"They're both real."

Jesse shook his head. The disgust on his face faded to tired contempt. Then the contempt softened into something else—regret, maybe. He rubbed his thumb slowly back and forth over the rim of his mug. "She was really smart, you know. And funny. And a good artist. I was happy when I was with her. Happier than I'd been for a long, long time."

"Jesse…I'm sorry." The words felt so hollow, even though he meant them. What good were words, now? "She didn't deserve to die. After it happened, I regretted my decision immediately, and when I saw the impact it had on you, I knew I'd made a terrible mistake, but it was too late to take it back, and—"

"Stop it."

He fell silent.

Jesse set the mug down, closed his eyes and rubbed the lids with his fingertips. "I hated you so much for so long. But what's the point? What good does it do? Sure, it's your fault Jane is dead. But it's my fault, too. Maybe more mine than yours."

"That's not true, Jesse. Now, I know you have a tendency to blame yourself for these sort of things, but you're not—"

"Jesus, just _listen_ to me for once."

Walt bit his tongue. It was hard to keep himself from going into lecture-mode when he was around Jesse, even after all this time. But he resolved not to interrupt again. This was what Jesse needed; to be heard.

Jesse drew in a deep breath, then let it out. "When I met her, she wasn't using. She was in a twelve-step program and everything. I'm the reason she started shooting up again. I mean, if you hadn't been there that night, then what? She still would have died. So really, what fuckin' difference does it make? I can't blame you for something that would've happened anyway. That was all me. And I made so many other mistakes after that. I didn't _have_ to start slinging meth again. I coulda stayed clean. I got back into it because I wanted to. I was pushing meth to the people in my NA meetings. Did you know that? That's how I met Andrea. I tried to sell her meth, and then I dragged her into all my shit. If she'd never gotten mixed up with me, she'd still be alive. They both would." His jaw tightened, and he looked up, a flicker of defiance in his eyes. "So don't go taking the credit for all my fuck-ups, yo. I can own them. I might be a pathetic excuse for a man, but I can do that much. Okay?"

Walt hesitated, then gave another small nod. A part of him still wanted to argue against the idea. After all, none of it would have happened if Jesse hadn't gotten involved with him. But he restrained himself.

Jesse picked up the mug again and turned it slowly in his hands. "I'm still pissed off at you, don't get me wrong. But we both made plenty of mistakes. I deserve to be here exactly as much as you do."

"You never intentionally hurt anyone. That's more than I can say for myself."

Jesse gave him one of those empty looks. "I shot Gale."

"I forced you into that position. And afterward, I just left you to deal with the repercussions. I wasn't there to help you. I should have been the one to do it, if it had to be done. I should have—" His words dissolved into a coughing fit. He doubled over, muffling the coughs against his hand.

Jesse put the mug down and stood quickly. "Hey…" He reached out, brows drawing together.

Walt waved him away as his coughs trailed off. "I'm fine. It's nothing. It's not like it'll kill me, right?" He managed a strained smile.

Jesse's uncertain, worried expression remained. "Does it…you know, hurt?"

"It hurts. But I'm used to it. I've had cancer for over two years now, after all. Drink your hot chocolate before it gets cold."

One corner of Jesse's mouth lifted; the barest ghost of a smile. "Even after everything that's happened, you still treat me like a kid."

Walt laughed, and the laugh became a wheeze. "Force of habit, I guess."

Jesse sighed. "Hang on." He disappeared briefly up the stairs and returned with a blanket, which he held out awkwardly. At first, Walt didn't understand; he stared. Jesse rolled his eyes. "Go on, take it."

Walt accepted it and draped it over himself. He wasn't sure how a blanket was supposed to help his coughing, but he was touched by the gesture, nonetheless. For a moment, in fact, he had to fight back tears. It took a ridiculous amount of willpower. Once he'd composed himself, he cleared his throat. "Thank you," he whispered.

Jesse stuffed his hands into his pockets and looked away. "Whatever, man." He picked up the mug, took a sip, and froze. His gaze locked with Walt's. "What did you do?" he asked, his voice bristling with accusation.

Walt frowned. "Pardon?"

"The hot chocolate!"

"I have no idea what you're talking about. Do you think I'm trying to poison you? Isn't that impossible here, anyway?"

"No! I mean—how the hell did you get it to _taste_ like hot chocolate when everything else tastes like nothing?"

A small jolt of shock shot down Walt's spine. "Let me try it." He took the mug and sipped, and his heart sank. Nothing.

Jesse leaned forward intently. "Well?"

"I can't taste anything," he said, fighting back his disappointment. "It must be a change in you."

"Or else you're lying."

"Why would I lie? I don't understand this place any better than you do. I don't know why you can taste again. But that seems like a good sign, don't you think?"

Jesse chewed his lower lip. He looked uncertain, off-balance, and suddenly much younger. "I dunno. You said you smelled chlorine for a minute. Maybe it's just this place screwing around with our heads. Maybe it doesn't mean anything."

"It means something."

Jesse squinted suspiciously at the mug, then cautiously took another sip of chocolate. His eyes slipped shut, and a small moan rose from his throat. "Holy fuck. I'd almost forgotten what this was like. It's so _good_. Why did I ever need drugs? If I was alive again, I'd just drink this shit all the time, every day." He drank greedily, messily, spilling some on his shirt. He drained the cup, panted for breath, and said, "I'm gonna make some more." He set it down and hurried into the kitchen.

Walt followed him and watched as he poured milk into a glass and stirred in several packets of instant chocolate, sloshing some onto the counter. Without even bothering to microwave it first, Jesse took a deep gulp. "Fuck!" He slammed the glass down on the counter. His face crumpled. "It's gone." He rested his elbows on the counter and buried his fingers in his hair.

"Completely?" Walt asked, bewildered. "No taste?"

"Yes! What did I tell you? It's this fucking _place._ It reminded me of how good it could be, just for a minute, then took it away again." He slid to the floor in despair and sat, staring dazedly at the ceiling.

Walt sat next to him on the floor. "I don't think that's what it's about. There are rules to everything. If we can just discover them, maybe we can find a way out of here."

"You're still talking about that, huh?" He leaned back against the counter, his eyes slipping shut. The eyelids were bruise-dark, the flesh around them smudged with the same darkness. "I wish you wouldn't. False hope is worse than none, y'know."

"I wouldn't say it unless I really believed it."

Jesse sighed and rubbed his eyelids—first the left, then the right—with his fist. There was something oddly childlike about the gesture. "Gotta hand it to you. You're persistent." A faint smile twitched across his lips. There were dark circles under his eyes, Walt noticed.

"You look exhausted. When's the last time you slept?"

"I don't like sleeping. Bad dreams. The pool is better."

"I think a full night's sleep would do you some good."

He snorted. "You gonna tell me to eat my vegetables, too? You got some nerve. Let me be clear here, in case I wasn't. I'm done taking advice from you." He pulled another unlit cigarette from his pocket, placed it between his lips, and tilted his head back, staring at the ceiling.

Walt couldn't blame him for that, really. But frustration churned inside him, anyway. Jesse was already back to his old habits, blotting out his mind and senses, running away from reality. He _needed_ someone to guide him and keep him centered. Maybe Walt could have been that, in another world, a world where he'd never gotten cancer, never started cooking. But then, if he hadn't, he and Jesse never would have started working together in the first place. It was all tangled together, the good with the bad. More bad than good, but still...what if different circumstances had brought them together? What then?

Maybe there was no point in what-ifs.

"I'll go back to my place, then," he said quietly.

Jesse hesitated, looking at him from the corner of his eye. "Do you have like, a bed or anything?"

"I sleep on the floor."

He was silent another moment…then heaved a frustrated sigh. "Hell, just sleep on my couch."

The words surprised him, so much that he wasn't immediately sure how to respond. "Are you comfortable with that?" he asked at last.

"It's not like I don't have the room. Who am I kidding? I hate being alone. I hate everything about this place. But the silence is the worst." He suddenly grabbed the cigarette from his mouth and whipped it across the kitchen. It bounced off the wall, hit the tiles, and rolled under the fridge. "I'm pathetic."

Walt opened his mouth automatically to correct him— _That kind of negative thinking doesn't help anything—_ then closed it again. He rested the back of his head against the cabinets, feeling the cold linoleum floor beneath his legs, listening to the faint hum of the refrigerator. "I appreciate you letting me stay here," he said finally. "Thank you."

Jesse stood slowly, not looking at him. "If you get hungry, there's Cap'n Crunch in the pantry. Might taste like foam peanuts, but it always kinda did anyway." He started to walk out.

"Jesse—"

He stopped, but didn't look back. "What?"

He paused, suddenly not sure what he wanted to say, just that he wanted to say _something._ "I truly do appreciate this. I mean, you letting me into your home, giving me the chance to speak with you. I realize that I'm the person you hate more than anyone in the world, and I completely understand where you're coming from on that, by the way, but—"

"No," Jesse said.

Walt froze. "No?"

"You're not the guy I hate more than anyone."

He blinked. "You don't hate me?"

"Oh, I do. But there's one guy I hate a lot more."

"Who?" He frowned, trying to think of someone who had hurt Jesse more than Walt himself had. "Todd? Gus Fring?"

Jesse just smiled mirthlessly, shook his head, and walked out of the kitchen.

* * *

Walt lay on Jesse's living room couch, a blanket draped over him. Jesse had already gone to bed. Walt's body felt weak and shaky with exhaustion, but his mind was wide awake, turning and clicking like a well-oiled machine.

Those small aberrations—the chlorine, the hot chocolate—they _had_ to be part of a pattern. After so many days of nothing, having a problem to solve was exhilarating. And if Walt could figure it out, maybe he could help Jesse.

Surely, that was why they were here together. Walt was supposed to help him. He was the one who'd led Jesse down the path to damnation, or whatever you wanted to call this. Now, he had to fix his mistakes. He had to guide his former student once again.

Walt made a piss-poor shepherd. Jesse would be better off with…well, almost anyone else. But there _was_ no one else. They were alone.

So he did what he did best. He thought.

-To be continued


	4. Chapter 4

AN: Thank you to everyone who has read and reviewed so far! :) Sorry it's been awhile since the last update, but this next chapter's a long one...

* * *

Ever since waking up in hell, Jesse Pinkman had been more-or-less constantly scared. Which was kind of weird, he guessed, because there was nothing to be scared _of._ This place was boredom city.

But of course, that was the worst part of it—the quiet. No distractions. No escape from his thoughts.

When he'd first woken up on the floor of his bedroom, he hadn't known what was going on. He didn't remember dying. For the first few hours, he'd wandered around in confusion, calling out _Hello? Anyone?_ And then, as realization sank in, a cold void crept through his stomach. He started to scream out any name he could remember. He screamed for Badger and Combo and Pete, for Jane, for Andrea, for Mike, for _Saul,_ for fuck's sake. He screamed for his parents and his little brother and his Aunt Ginny.

A few times, to his shame, he screamed for Mr. White.

The silence here was thick, like cotton. It seemed to swallow his voice, muffling his cries...not that it mattered, because there was no one around to hear. Once he figured out where he was, it hadn't taken him long to break. He'd retreated back to his bedroom, fallen to his knees, and bawled like a little bitch. Like a child. And when he couldn't take it anymore, he smashed the mirror, picked up a shard of glass, and slit his wrists.

Except apparently human bodies didn't work the same way in this place, because he didn't bleed. The glass's edge just kind of sank into his skin like it was clay, and when he pulled it back, there was no cut, not even a mark.

* * *

Time crawled by. The TV buzzed with white snow. When he listened really carefully, he thought he could hear voices whispering to him in the static, but he knew it was just his brain playing tricks. There was no one here.

He hunted through the medicine cabinets, gathered up all the pills he could find, and took them all, emptying the bottles one after another into his mouth, spilling capsules everywhere. Minutes later, he puked them all up in a sludgy gush. His stomach hurt for hours. After that, he jammed a fork into the toaster, saw an explosion of red stars, and woke up on the kitchen floor with a blinding headache. He tried to stab himself in the stomach with a steak knife, samurai style, but in the end he was too much of a pussy. He had never liked knives.

Instead, he climbed up onto the roof of his house and jumped off, trying to break his neck on the ground below. There was a snap and a lightning bolt of pain, and when he stood up, the word was sideways; he had knocked his head 90 degrees to the left, but it was somehow still on. After awhile he managed to shove it back into place, but it hurt like a bitch.

This was fucking ridiculous. He felt like he was stuck in a Tom and Jerry cartoon. Except it wasn't the least bit funny.

He went back into the house and stared at the buzzing, blank screen of the TV. The static whispered and spit like demonic voices. He shut his eyes and pressed his hands to his temples.

Every second in this dead, empty place seemed to stretch into an eternity. Christ, what he would do to hear a human voice just for two seconds. To touch someone, anyone.

Somehow, this was worse even than the dark pit where Todd had kept him. There, at least, he'd gotten to talk to someone once in awhile. Even if they were people he hated, even if he would have done anything to get out, he hadn't been totally alone. They needed him to cook meth.

But here…here, no one needed him.

* * *

He thought about Jane. He thought about Andrea and Brock and all the other lives he had ruined.

He started to think about things from further back in his past, too, things he hadn't thought about for years. Like, there had been this _dream…_

It was on a Sunday. He remembered, because his parents had dragged him to church. He always hated that. He was eight years old, a twitchy, fidgety kid, and he wanted to be playing video games or hanging with his friends or doing pretty much anything else besides sitting on a bench (or a pew, or whatever those things were called) listening to the elderly choir wobble its way through some depressing hymn that had probably been written back in the days when people rode horses and crapped out their windows because there was no indoor plumbing. The only thing worse than the music was the sermons, which were only about twelve minutes long, but which felt like eight hours. There were stories about God drowning the world and God sending down plagues of locusts and doing all kinds of shitty things to the insignificant ant-like humans who pissed him off.

God—thought eight-year-old Jesse Pinkman—was kind of a dick. Trying to please him seemed a lot like trying to live up to the expectations of an insanely strict parent. You might as well not even try, because He'd never be fucking happy with you.

There was a whole sermon about hell once. Hell, the preacher said, was not really about physical torture. It was abandonment. It was being cut off from everything and everyone you loved, completely alone, and knowing that there was no possibility of escape, no rescue, no chance that things would ever get better.

Jesse had rolled his eyes and made farting noises—loud enough that the elderly couple in the next pew turned around to look back at him. His mother had given him the Glare of Death, and afterward he'd been grounded for the rest of the day. She'd even taken away his sketchpad. He'd been really pissed off about that. For most of that day, he was just bummed out about missing the rest of the weekend. He didn't think about the sermon.

But that night, he had the worst nightmare of his life. He dreamed that someone grabbed him out of his bed, pulled a bag over his head, tied up his hands and feet, tossed him into the back of a truck and drove out into the middle of nowhere, and then threw him in a dark, deep hole in the ground and covered it up with wooden boards. He never saw their faces. He screamed for help and kept screaming until his throat was raw, but no one came…and he suddenly realized that no one _was_ coming. Because he knew—in that way you sometimes just _know_ things in dreams—that his parents weren't even going to look for him. He'd done too many bad things, let them down too many times. They didn't care anymore, and he was going to die here. And he suddenly realized that this was what the preacher had been talking about—this dark, cold, empty hole where no one would ever find him or help him. This was hell.

He woke with tears on his cheeks. His shaking didn't stop for a long time.

By morning, the details of the dream had slipped away, grown fuzzy. But a shadow of it still lingered in the back of his head, shifting around, making him uneasy. For years afterward, that shadow never totally went away; he still thought about it, once in awhile. But he never told anyone. What would he even tell them? That he'd had a bad dream when he was eight years old and never quite gotten over it? He might as well paint the word PUSSY on his face in sparkling purple letters and offer the world a baseball bat to beat his ass with.

Well, he _almost_ told someone once. It was a hot sticky afternoon in August, and he and Badger had gotten really high. Maybe they'd gotten a bad batch or something because it had made him a little paranoid and wiggy, and he'd started babbling about the shadow inside his head and the dark hole from his dream, the place of abandonment.

But Badger had just given him a really weird look, so Jesse had said, "Hey, you know what? Let's watch Yo Gabba Gabba. I heard that shit is amazing when you're stoned."

For awhile, that dark hole had just been a dim memory. Then he'd started dreaming about it again after he killed Gale. He felt it pulling at him, drawing him in, and he realized—the hole wasn't a _place_. It was inside him. It was always there. He could forget about it for awhile, surround himself with people and music, drown himself in drugs, but he could never be totally free. All he could do was keep running.

* * *

Jesse sat on his bed, numbly staring out the window. He didn't know how long he'd been sitting here. It didn't seem to matter. Time didn't exist.

Then he saw something moving outside the window. His eyes snapped back into focus. And there was Mr. White, just walking down the street. Jesse's jaw dropped. For a moment, his brain refused to accept what he was seeing.

His own breathing echoed in his ears, ragged and harsh. His heart was pounding so hard it made him sick.

Mr. White started to turn his head toward him, and Jesse quickly ducked out of sight. When he looked up again, the street was empty.

Jesse bit down on his wrist, squeezed his eyes shut and struggled to control his breathing. He was getting dizzy, and he felt like he was going to throw up or something. _He's here. Holy fuck, he's HERE._

It didn't make any sense. But then, nothing about this place made sense.

He thought about all the lies Mr. White had told him, the ugly, cruel things he had done. Anger flared up and bubbled in his brain, and he clung to it, because it was better than fear or despair. He fed it, nursing it into a bright flame, trying to ignore the other feelings beneath it.

Mr. White was a monster. He'd ruined Jesse's life. Yet when Jesse first saw the figure of his former chemistry teacher, what he felt was not rage or horror, but relief—blinding, overwhelming relief. He wasn't alone.

He hated Walter White. But there was one guy he hated a lot more, and that guy was Jesse Pinkman.

* * *

 _Knock-knock-knock_. "Are you up?"

Mr. White's voice.

Jesse's brain felt foggy and soupy. He couldn't remember where he was or what was going on. For a moment he thought he was in high school again. Shit, he was probably late for class. But why was Mr. White at his _house?_

And then the past decade or so slammed back into his head like a sledgehammer. Oh. Right. They had created a meth empire together and then died, and now they were living next to each other in this weird Twilight Zone suburb in hell, and after nursing his anger for as long as he could, Jesse had finally caved in and invited Mr. White into his house, let him sleep on his couch. And now, he was outside Jesse's door and knocking furiously away, like a giant woodpecker on cocaine.

Fuck, he didn't want to deal with this. He groaned, rolled over, and buried his face against the pillow.

More knocking. "Jesse. It's past noon."

"There is no 'noon' here, bitch," he muttered. "What gives? Just let me sleep."

"Well, the sky has been light for a long time. Are you planning to sleep away the rest of eternity? We have work to do."

Work? Was he kidding? Jesse folded the pillow around his head like a taco shell, trying to shut out the intruding voice, but he knew it was useless.

Walt knocked again. "I'm coming in. I hope you're dressed."

Jesse groaned. "Don't! Just let me—"

Walt barged in and stood with his hands planted on his hips, surveying the room—the clothes strewn across the floor, the smashed mirror, the dishes on the floor, still crusted with smears of ketchup from before he'd given up on food, accepted that it tasted like nothing and that he didn't need to eat anyway. Walt clucked—actually _clucked_ at him like a disapproving nanny—and shook his head. "Is this how your room always looks?"

Jesse threw a pillow at his head. Walt caught it with one hand, and Jesse glowered at him. "Are you _ever_ going to stop riding my ass? Is that even a remote possibility?"

"Nope," Walt replied. He pulled some clothes out of a drawer and tossed them at Jesse. "Get dressed."

Jesse wondered what had triggered this change in Mr. White. Last night he'd been apologetic, almost nervous. Now he was back to his old annoying self. "Okay, what gives? What is this about?"

"I'm going to conduct an experiment, and I need your help."

"An experiment," Jesse repeated. He sighed and palmed his face. He was going to regret letting Walter White into his house. Hell, he already regretted it. "What kind?"

"You'll see."

"And if I say no, what then? You'll go all Heisenberg on my ass?"

His expression shifted, and for a moment, there was something almost like sadness in his eyes. "There's no Heisenberg here, Jesse. I'm all that's left. And if you really want me to leave, I'll leave. This is your house, after all. But for as long as you let me stay, I'm not going to let you waste your life. Afterlife. Whatever." He clapped his hands together. "We're going to make the best of this situation."

Jesse looked away. It infuriated him, that Walt was doing his optimistic pull-yourself-up-by-the-bootstraps horseshit, even in _fucking hell_. Still singing the same song, blithely in denial, telling himself it would all somehow work out. If Jesse had an ounce of self-respect, he would kick this douche out to the curb. But who the hell was he kidding? If he had any self-respect, he would have said goodbye to Mr. White a long time ago.

He sighed. "Lemme get dressed. I'll be down in a minute."

When Jesse entered the kitchen, Walt was pushing scrambled eggs around in a pan. He'd tossed the empty shells into a nearby bowl.

Jesse frowned. "So we're gonna do the experiments after breakfast, or what?"

"This _is_ the experiment," Walt replied, as if it should have been obvious.

"Right. Okay. Should I even bother asking?"

"What do you like in your omelet? Though I suppose there's not a lot to choose from. We have American cheese or plain."

Jesse could have pointed out that a plain omelet wasn't really an omelet, it was just eggs. But he didn't have the energy. Knowing Mr. White, he would turn it into an hour-long debate and would use a lot of chemistry metaphors and probably start throwing around words like _epistemology_ just to make Jesse feel stupid. "Cheese, I guess."

"Cheese it is. Oh, could you get the coffee started?"

"It's not gonna taste like anything, y'know. I don't even bother drinking it anymore."

"Just make some for me, then."

Sighing, Jesse spooned some grounds into the coffee filter and started the machine. He watched it drip down into the pot. As usual, it had no smell. He thought forlornly of all the cups of coffee he'd had when he was alive and how he'd never really appreciated them. When it was finished, he poured himself a cup and took a swig. "I told you." He held the cup up. "Nothing."

"We'll see." Walt scraped the omelets off the pan and onto two plates and handed one to Jesse, then poured a cup of coffee for himself and sat down. "Go on." He nodded toward the plate.

Jesse sat and examined the omelet, poking at it with his fork. Walt was leaning forward, watching him intently. It was irritating as fuck. He obviously expected something to happen, but trying to pry it out of him would be a waste of time. So Jesse cut off a piece of omelet with his fork and stuffed it into his mouth.

A small, startled sound of pleasure escaped him. The eggs were warm, moist, and full of cheesy goodness. He could taste the salt and a hint of pepper. He swallowed it eagerly, then shoveled more into his mouth, so fast he nearly choked.

"Easy," Walt said. He took a bite of his own eggs and chewed, though with considerably less enthusiasm. "It's not going to run away, I promise."

Jesse washed down the eggs with a swig of coffee—which was, he noticed, still totally flavorless, though he was too hungry to dwell on that weird little fact—then went back to wolfing down his omelet. His long-dormant appetite had awakened and was roaring for more; his saliva glands gushed like faucets. He didn't look up again until he'd finished.

Walt was leaning back in his chair, ignoring the eggs and slowly sipping his coffee with obvious relish. His eyes were closed. "I'd almost forgotten what this was like."

"You can taste it?"

"I can. Excellent coffee, Jesse. Thank you." He opened his eyes and smiled, an odd, sly, playful smile. "I'd ask how the omelet was, but considering how you inhaled it, I'd say it was adequate."

Jesse squinted at him. "You knew it would be like this. How?"

"Think," Walt said. "You can figure this out."

"Oh, come _on._ Don't be a dick."

Walt sipped his coffee again and let out a contented sigh.

Jesse glowered at him. And something clicked. "You can taste the coffee but not the eggs. I can taste the eggs but not the coffee. Last night, I could taste the chocolate, but you couldn't. Because you made it. We can only taste stuff if we don't make it for ourselves."

His smile widened. "Correct," he said…and Jesse was suddenly, powerfully reminded of the one time in chemistry class when Walt had called on him and he'd gotten the answer right. Walt had smiled exactly like that, looking surprised and pleased, even proud, and it had given Jesse an unexpected little thrill. He'd resented it—resented the fact that Mr. White's opinion mattered to him at all. But it did. It always had.

Jesse ran a hand through his hair, feeling no less confused. "Why?"

Walt's smile faded a little. "I don't know. But we're learning, and that's good." He finished off his coffee with a decisive slurp and went to refill the mug. "This place has its own set of rules, its own natural order. We've figured out one of those rules, and now we can enjoy food again. You see? Things aren't totally hopeless."

"Yeah? And what if the rules change tomorrow?"

"Then we'll figure out why. I made a promise that I'd get you out of here, and I'm going to do it, even if it takes a thousand years."

A weird feeling washed over Jesse. It had been like this when they were alive, too. Even when things seemed impossible, Mr. White always insisted there was a way and pushed and lectured and scolded until Jesse fell in line. They were falling back into the same old pattern. Except everything was different, now. _They_ were different.

Jesse picked at the wood grain of the table. "Can I ask you a question?"

"Of course."

"Why are you so desperate to help me out? I mean, am I supposed to believe that you're doing all this just 'cause you're such a nice guy?"

They stared at each other across the breakfast table.

"I don't know what you want me to say," Walt said. "So, all right. Tell me. Why do _you_ think I'm doing this?"

Jesse was gripping the fork handle too hard, the metal edges pressing into his palm, burning.

Maybe he should just stop now. Avoid the drama. Make things easy. But then, he'd done a lot of that in life, and look where it had gotten him.

"You want to know what I think, Mr. White? I think _you_ want to get out of here. You want to try to make up for what you did so that whoever's in charge of this place will forgive you. You think this is like a game, that you can level up to a better afterlife if you get enough points for good behavior. You're hoping that if you help me, you'll be able to save your own sorry-ass soul and go be with your family in a big suburban house in the sky."

Mr. White just stared at him. He looked almost sad. But Jesse wasn't fooled by the act, not anymore.

He looked down at his own hand. His knuckles were white, his hand shaking slightly as he clutched the fork. "I'm a pawn to you. I always was. I'm not even angry about it. I just want you to tell me the truth. Admit you're trying to save yourself."

"I'm beyond salvation," Walt said quietly. "Don't you think I know that? I'm never going to see my wife or children again." His voice hitched. He stopped, breathing in, then continued firmly: "But you're better than me. You-"

"Look, I didn't _ask_ you to help me. Just...stop working so hard at it, okay?"

"I will not let you give up on yourself this easily."

More lectures. Jesse closed his eyes. A dull ache surged and ebbed behind them. Apparently you could still get headaches in the afterlife. One of the universe's great mysteries solved. He pushed himself away from the table and stood. "I'm gonna go float in the pool awhile," he muttered.

"Wait." His voice softened. "Please."

Deep down, a tiny worm of doubt wiggled. What if, for once, Mr. White was actually being sincere? What if he really had changed?

No. Impossible. The dude was a sociopath.

But he hadn't been that way when Jesse first met him _. Heisenberg_ was a sociopath. Not Mr. White.

God, this was confusing.

"Look," he muttered, "I need some time."

"How much time?"

"I don't know, okay? Just…go read a book, or something, and leave me alone."

"Jesse—"

He started to walk out, but Mr. White leaped to his feet and grabbed his wrist, stopping him. Jesse tensed. Walt's grip was strong. His chest tightened. "Let go."

"I don't think spending time in the pool is good for you."

"I don't _care._ " He pulled, but Mr. White's fingers tightened around his wrist. Jesse's breathing came faster, harsher. Wires were pulling inside his chest, cold and sharp. "You don't get to decide what I do."

"Let's just talk—"

"I said let _go!"_ He pulled harder, and they stumbled to one side, ramming into the cabinets. Panic blared in his head like alarm bells, clouding his thoughts. Panting, Jesse fumbled for the silverware drawer, yanked it open, and groped inside until his hand closed around the smooth hilt of a steak knife. He held it up, the blade quivering. "I'm fucking serious."

Walt's shouldered stiffened, but he didn't release his grip. "You're not going to kill me," he said firmly. There was the faintest hint of doubt beneath the surface of his tone. "And I am not going to let you drown yourself. I don't care if we _are_ already dead."

" _Back the fuck off!_ "

"Jesse, for God's sake, will you just _listen—_ "

The grappled, wrestling each other back and forth across the kitchen, bumping into walls, knocking the toaster to the floor. Jesse punched him, and his glasses went flying, clattering to the linoleum.

"This is absurd!" Walt snapped. "Stop being such a child!"

That—that was the last fucking straw.

Something broke inside Jesse, and suddenly, all he could see was Jane's pale dead face, Gale's terrified eyes, Brock lying still and silent in the hospital, Andrea falling dead to the street. The pain erupted inside him, roaring in his head like an explosion. A scream exploded from his throat, a long, primal roar. He plunged the knife into Walt's face, straight into his right eye.

Walt staggered backward and hit the wall. He stood motionless for a few seconds, his good eye staring dazedly into space, his mouth hanging open.

Jesse's insides turned cold. On some level, he'd assumed they couldn't kill each other here, because suicide didn't work, but maybe he was wrong. Maybe it was like the eggs, like the hot chocolate, and it only worked when they did it for each other. Maybe he'd just killed his only friend, and now he'd be alone for the rest of eternity, screaming with no one to hear.

No. No. No. "Mr. White," he whispered. "I..."

Slowly, Walt reached up. He probed his face with shaking fingers, touched the hilt of the knife. There was, Jesse suddenly noticed, no blood. Teeth gritted, Walt closed his fingers around the knife hilt. With a grunt, he wrenched it out. His eye wasn't bleeding, just kind of messed up, like clay that had been smooshed…but even as Jesse watched, it reformed itself. Just like that. The knife slipped from Walt's grip and clattered to the floor.

A wave of relief swept over Jesse. And then he was angry again, and then scared and confused. He didn't know what he felt. He backed away.

"It's all right." Walt held up a shaking hand. He was a little pale. "I'm fine. We're both fine. We just…got carried away."

Jesse's rapid breathing drowned out everything else. He'd just plunged a knife into a man's head. He'd done it so easily, without even thinking.

 _Of course,_ a voice deep inside him whispered. _You're a murderer._ Jane and Gale and Andrea flashed through his memory once more, along with all the other people he'd hurt and killed. _My fault._ His vision went blurry. The walls seemed to be moving toward him, closing in.

He turned and bolted out of the room, out of the house. He could hear Mr. White calling his name, but he didn't look back.

When he reached the pool, he stripped down to his boxers, jumped into the cold water, and let himself sink slowly to the bottom. He watched the light above him rippling and shimmering, growing small and faraway as he sank down and down. The cold penetrated his skin and seeped into his bones, numbing him. He closed his eyes and breathed out, expelling the last of the air from his lungs. For a moment his chest hurt, and then there was no feeling at all. The numbness was all he had left, so he let it take him, let himself become nothing. It wouldn't last, he knew. But he went gratefully into the darkness.

There was no redemption here. Not for either one of them.

* * *

Walt remained where he was, leaning against the wall, staring at the curiously bloodless knife. He turned the blade until he saw a sliver of his own reflection staring back at him. "You don't learn, do you?" he asked himself. "You keep making the same mistakes."

With a sigh, he set the knife on the counter.

He'd known that Jesse hated him, of course. But still, deep down he hadn't believed that his former protégé would be willing to thrust a steak knife into his eye…not that it mattered, in this place. It hadn't even hurt. Jesse's punches had hurt, when he'd beaten Walt, but the knife had simply been a cold, uncomfortable pressure, a feeling of _absence_.

Of course, he had no one to blame but himself. Once again, he'd pushed too hard, had done things wrong, and now he'd shattered whatever fragile, tentative bond had begun to develop between them. Or maybe there hadn't even been a bond, and he'd been imagining things. Either way, it was gone now, and Jesse was obviously upset—

No. Upset was the wrong word. He was shattered. He'd been shattered for a long time now. Walt was like a man who was trying to reassemble a broken porcelain vase that was in a thousand pieces, and he didn't know where any of the pieces were supposed to go or how to reattach them.

One step forward, three steps back.

Walt spent some time tidying up the kitchen, washing the cups and pan, but his heart wasn't in it. He hadn't slept much the previous night, and his vision kept blurring with exhaustion. He wandered up to Jesse's room and stared at the broken mirror, the scattered plates and clothes. He knelt and picked up one of the fragments, turning it over in his hands.

His presence here was only making things worse. Maybe he should just leave Jesse alone, after all.

He didn't think Jesse would want him sleeping on the couch, so he went back to his own house. After the relative comfort of Jesse's home, the empty rooms looked even more barren, more inhospitable.

He collapsed onto the floor, but despite his fatigue, sleep wouldn't come. His chest hurt. Coughing fits came and went, until finally, he picked himself up, sore and stiff and feeling about a hundred and twenty years old, and walked through the empty rooms of his house, one by one, the way he'd done countless times before Jesse's arrival pulled him out of his own dull misery. He ran his hand along the wall and closed his eyes, trying to pretend that he was still alive, that Skyler was making breakfast in the kitchen, that Junior was upstairs, getting ready for school. He tried to imagine that he could hear their voices. If he let his mind relax, he almost _could_ hear them. He could sink into his memories, into the past.

Was this what the pool was like, for Jesse? Maybe he had the right idea, after all. Perhaps hope was foolish, and the best they could do was try to numb themselves to the horror of their own reality.

The buzz of a fly whined its way into his consciousness, like a drill. It circled his head a few times and landed on the wall, a huge, black, hairy monstrosity. Sudden animal rage seized him, and he slammed his hand on the wall. When he lifted his palm, the fly fell to the floor, dead. He felt a brief, savage stab of satisfaction, and then a dull, aching emptiness.

A tickle in his lungs became a coughing fit—one of those deep, full-bodied ones that wouldn't stop and that left him hollow and raw on the inside. He wiped his mouth, and his hand came away bloody. He winced and automatically went into the bathroom to wash himself off…but of course, the faucet wasn't working.

He wiped his hand off on a dirty towel and surveyed the room.

The shower was flecked with rust, the toilet empty of water. But to his surprise, the poetry book that Gale had given him— _Leaves of Grass—_ was sitting atop the tank lid, where it had always rested in life. His pulse quickened. He'd been in the bathroom a thousand times since he woke up here; he was certain that book had not been there before.

His hands trembled slightly as picked it up and opened it to the title page, which Gale had signed, _To my_ other _favorite W.W. It's an honor working with you._ Except now, it said something different.

 _Here's a little secret, from one chemist to another: there is no such thing as death. There are no endings and no beginnings. There is only change._

 _Find the door. It's there, if you only look in the right place._

 _G.B._

Walt heard his own breathing escalating. The book slipped from his trembling fingers. He turned in a circle, looking wildly around. "Gale…Gale, are you there? Can you hear me?"

No answer. When he bent to pick up the book, the words had reverted back to their original form: _To my other favorite W.W._ Etc.

"I don't understand," Walt whispered.

He stared, waiting, willing the words to change. They didn't.

He knew what he had seen, though—what he'd read. His pulse drummed in his throat, in his fingertips. He needed to tell Jesse about this.

But Jesse didn't want to see him or speak to him now. And even if he did, would he believe him?

A sudden spasm of pain seized his chest. He clutched at his shirt, gasping for breath. He'd been dealing with pain ever since he woke up here, but nothing of this caliber. He felt as if he had inhaled a lungful of hot, ash-filled air, and he was burning alive from the inside out. He wheezed, choking. The book slipped from his fingers and hit the floor, and his knees buckled under him.

A tremendous weight pressed him down against the cold tiles. His vision went swimmy. And then there was darkness.

-To be continued


	5. Chapter 5

Jesse had been floating for hours, or maybe days. He didn't know, didn't care.

He spent most of that time immersed in memories of Jane. Her smile. Her voice. That warm golden afternoon they went to the art gallery together. Eating breakfast with her. Making love to her in his bed.

With Jane, it really _had_ been making love. He'd had sex with plenty of women before her, but when he met Jane, he understood that _this_ was what it was supposed to feel like, this was real.

Or maybe that had all been part of the illusion. Maybe he'd fallen for her so hard only because he was so lonely and desperate and in need of someone to erase the pain. They were each other's heroin; they drowned in each other's warmth. Dirty and tainted though it was, his time with her had given him a glimpse of what things could be like. He tried to sink deeper into the dream, to lose himself totally in the red of her lips and the warmth of her soft hands on his skin.

And then the dream changed. Jesse was on his knees, blood dripping from his mouth, pain throbbing through his smashed nose. There was a chain around his neck. A rough, calloused hand gripped the chain and yanked. Scarred fingers threaded themselves through his hair and pulled hard enough to make his eyes water, and a deep male voice whispered, _You gonna be good, Jesse? You gonna do what you're told?_

No. Not this. He tried to go back to Jane, to the smell of her skin and hair, but the other memory kept pushing itself back into his consciousness. The threadbare, stained carpet, the cracked walls, the stink of beer and cigarettes and piss and dirty fingers…

His eyes snapped open underwater. A flurry of bubbles escaped his mouth, and he kicked out weakly—it was always hard to move, when he first surfaced from the trance. He thrashed harder, struggling to free himself from the cobwebs of sleep, pushing up and up toward the faint shimmering light until his head broke the surface.

He hauled himself onto the cement and vomited water, then flopped onto his back and lay, chest hitching, air whistling and wheezing in his throat as his body remembered how to breathe again.

Even the pool wasn't safe anymore. There was nowhere he could get away from his own mind.

Slowly, he sat up and stared at the house next to his. Walter White was somewhere in that house. Doing what? Jesse tried to visualize how Mr. White might occupy himself when he was alone—no one to lie to, no one to lecture or manipulate. All he could see was his former chemistry teacher sitting in a corner of the room, staring forlornly into space.

For a moment, Jesse caught himself feeling sorry for the guy. Then he ran through the mental checklist of all the atrocities Mr. White had committed: letting Jane die, poisoning Brock, abandoning Jesse to those human monsters who'd kept him locked in that dark, stinking pit. A flame of anger flared, but it was weaker than usual.

Instead, he kept thinking of the scrambled eggs that Mr. White had made for him, and the hot chocolate.

He knew exactly what was going on. This was like some weird variation of Stockholm Syndrome; he was getting attached because he had no other options. He was starting to forget that he was dealing with the devil, that Mr. White never did _anything_ without an ulterior motive.

And yet he knew, too, that avoiding him wouldn't change their situation one bit.

He went into the kitchen and started assembling the ingredients for a grilled cheese sandwich. He hadn't made one of these for awhile, but he used to cook them all the time for his Aunt Ginny. They were a special favorite of hers.

Once the sandwich was ready, he carried it over to Mr. White's house and knocked on the door. "Yo. Mr. White? You there?" There was no answer. He tried the knob. Unlocked.

He found Mr. White on the floor of the bathroom, curled up. His glasses had fallen off. Blood flecked his beard. There were tear-tracks on his cheeks, and his breathing was faint and raspy. For a minute or two, Jesse just stood there, staring down at him. He looked helpless and old and pitiful. Jesse wanted to feel some vengeful satisfaction over that, but he didn't. He just sort of wanted to cry.

He crouched and set the plate down on the floor. "Hey. Mr. White?" Gently, Jesse shook his shoulder.

His eyelids flickered. "Junior?" he whispered.

Something inside Jesse's chest twisted and hurt a little. "No. Just me." He helped Mr. White into a sitting position and leaned him against the wall.

"Jesse…" He blinked, looking confused, disoriented. "I can't see."

"Here." Jesse picked up the glasses and slipped them onto his face. One of the handles had gotten bent a little, so they were crooked.

"Thank you." He stared dazedly at the ceiling, his chest rising and falling. "I saw…" He sat up straighter, a strange, wild look in his eyes. "Hand me that book."

"What book?" Then he spotted it, lying on the floor. "This?" He picked it up and handed it to Mr. White, who fumbled it open and stared at the first page.

He must not have seen whatever he was looking for, because the hope crumbled away from his face. The book slipped from his fingers and landed on the tiles, open. "I saw it. I _know_ I saw it."

"Saw _what?"_

"There was a message from Gale," he said. "He said that there was a door. A way out."

Jesse squinted at him. "Gale? As in, the guy I killed?" He couldn't keep the skepticism out of his tone. "He just decided to pop in and give us a piece of friendly advice?"

"I didn't dream it. I swear." His gaze met Jesse's. "You think I'm losing my mind?"

"I think maybe you're a little tired."

Mr. White heaved an exasperated sigh. "I'm fine. It's this place…" His nostrils twitched. "What's that smell?"

Jesse pressed the sandwich into his hands.

His brows knitted. "This is for me?"

"Yeah. Sure," Jesse muttered. "Eat up."

Walt began to eat…slowly at first, then faster, wolfing it down in messy bites, getting crumbs in his beard and on his shirt. When he was finished, he licked more crumbs from his fingers, then sighed and leaned back, closing his eyes. "Thank you."

Jesse sat down on the bathroom floor across from him and folded his arms atop his knees. "Seemed only fair. I mean, you made me the eggs and all." After a brief pause, he added, "Sorry. For stabbing you."

Weary greenish eyes opened. "Did it make you feel any better?"

"Not really." Jesse huddled on the floor, hugging his knees to his chest. After a moment, he stood and offered a hand. Mr. White took it. His palm was hot and damp with sweat. He stumbled a little as he got to his feet, falling against Jesse's shoulder, then straightened, mumbling apologies.

"Don't worry about it. Here. Lean against me." He slipped an arm around Mr. White's waist, and they made their way slowly to the front door.

Mr. White shuffled along, head bowed, obviously still pretty shaky. He coughed and wiped a trace of blood from his mouth. "Where are we going?"

"Back to my place. It's not like I don't have the room."

There was a pause. Then he whispered, his voice weak and hoarse and almost inaudible, "I don't deserve you."

It was weird, seeing him like this. It didn't seem like _him._ "Whatever," Jesse muttered. "Just take it easy."

* * *

By the time Walt had gotten settled in on Jesse's couch, a blanket draped around his shoulders, he was starting to feel more clear-headed. And with the clarity came the old, familiar embarrassment at his own weakness. He brushed the crumbs out of his beard and wiped a bit of bloody drool from the corner of his mouth. Shameful, shameful. Being human was so ugly, so messy.

He cleared his throat. "That probably wasn't very pleasant. I'm sorry that you had to see me like that."

"What? Sick?" Jesse shrugged. He stood in the middle of the living room, hands in his pockets. "I took care of my aunt. She had cancer too, remember? I picked her up off the bathroom floor more than once."

"Well, you probably didn't enjoy that either."

"I wouldn't say I _enjoyed_ it. But…I dunno. That was one of the few times in my life I really helped someone. I felt useful. When I was making food for her, or getting her blankets and pillows, or whatever, I felt like maybe I wasn't such a shitty human being after all." Jesse turned his face away. His eyes glazed over, as if he were looking at something far away. "You want some coffee? I could use some coffee."

Without waiting for an answer, Jesse headed into the kitchen.

Walt's chest felt hollowed and scraped out, like a jack-o-lantern, his body wobbly and weak. The sandwich had helped a little, but he could feel the cancer eating him up inside like a parasite—a fat tick attached to his lung, sucking up his life energy. How was it possible to hurt so much when you were already dead?

Jesse returned carrying two mugs. Walt accepted one, cradling it between both hands, and took a shaky sip. It was hot and rich and faintly, darkly bitter. He breathed a small sigh and savored the feeling of warmth spreading through him.

The message from Gale floated through his head again. He couldn't blame Jesse for not believing him. It was absurd. Why would _Gale_ of all people want to help them? Maybe it _had_ been a dream, or a hallucination, or some meaningless trick of this place.

But what if it wasn't?

For some reason, he kept thinking of lit matches. _Change._ Gale had spoken of change. No endings and no beginnings. Chemistry. Molecules interacting, binding, forming compounds, becoming something else through the process of linking together. It was a riddle. He just had to figure it out.

Jesse sat down across from him. "You really think there's a door, huh."

Walt looked at him. Jesse stared back. He was trying to keep his expression blank, but Walt could see the uncertainty in his eyes, and something more than that. Hope. It was small and tentative, quivering like a candle flame on the verge of going out, but it was _there_.

Slowly, Walt set the mug on the coffee table. "Yes. I do." In actuality, he wasn't sure at all. But he kept his voice firm. He needed to believe, needed _Jesse_ to believe. "That's what I've been telling you. This place—this isn't eternity. Change is the only constant. If there's anything I understand about reality, it's that."

"This isn't chemistry, Mr. White."

"Maybe it is. Maybe we're here to balance an equation."

"If that's the case, I'm fucked." Jesse smiled without humor. "I flunked chemistry, remember?"

Walt lowered his gaze. Slowly, absently, he rubbed his thumb over his ring finger, over the place where his wedding band had once been. It hadn't followed him into the afterlife.

And he suddenly found himself thinking about Krazy-8.

Now there was a man he hadn't thought about for a long time. Yet he was the first person Walt had ever killed. Well, second, technically…but the first had happened so fast, he'd barely had time to think about it. With Krazy-8, he'd had time to contemplate, to weigh the pros and cons. He had done all that and then consciously chosen to take a man's life. After talking to him, getting to know him, making sandwiches for him, Walt had crushed his throat.

And he'd done it in Jesse's basement, in this very house. Just days after meeting him, he'd made Jesse Pinkman into an accomplice to murder.

And he remembered Jesse coming to him later, after the whole ugly business was wrapped up and Walt had made the decision never to cook again— _ha_. Jesse had wanted to talk about what had happened, because there was no one else either one of them could talk to. And Walt had pushed him away, brushed him aside like a buzzing fly. He wished he hadn't done that. He had the sense that if he had just talked to Jesse that day, things might have been different.

And he thought, too, about Skyler's silly talking pillow, the one they'd passed around in a circle when they were discussing their feelings about Walt's decision not to undergo treatment. Maybe it wasn't so silly. There were so many things he and Jesse had never said to each other. Their relationship had been defined by the negative spaces between words.

"You didn't flunk chemistry. As I recall, you squeaked by with a D minus," Walt said.

"Hooray for me."

A slight smile twitched across Walt's lips. "It was as if you knew exactly how much effort to expect in order to just barely pass. You were always goofing off in class, laughing with your friends, drawing in your notebook or making eyes at some girl instead of listening to my lectures. You'd come into class stoned or hungover and fall asleep drooling on your tests. There were times I wanted to grab you and shake you until your teeth rattled."

"Yeah, I know. I was the dumbest kid in your class. But what's the point—"

"No, you weren't."

Jesse frowned.

"You weren't dumb at all," Walt said. "That's what made it so frustrating. You had potential, but you refused to apply yourself to anything. It infuriated me. But I never stopped to ask why. It never occurred to me that you might be going through some emotional problems, some kind of trouble at home. That was it, wasn't it? Maybe if I had just listened to you instead of lecturing you all the time...if I'd dug a little deeper, instead of just focusing on your grades..."

"There's nothing you could have done, Mr. White. Even if you'd tried, I wouldn't have listened. Some people are just born losers, you know?"

"That isn't true," he replied firmly. "I don't want to hear you saying those things about yourself."

"Why not?" Jesse looked at him, expressionless. "You called me names all the time. You put me down. So why can't I do it? You're the only one who gets the privilege of shitting on me?"

The words hit Walt like a punch in the chest. "I..." The words died in his throat. What could he say? It was true, wasn't it? How many times had he called Jesse stupid, or pathetic, or some variation of that? At the time, he'd been too blinded by his own obsessions to realize just how casually cruel he had been.

He felt a sudden impulse to give his former partner a hug. But he didn't have the right. After all he had done, all the pain he'd caused him, all the people he'd destroyed…how could he be so presumptuous as to think that Jesse would _want_ comfort from him?

"Forget about it," Jesse said. He breathed in slowly. After a moment, he raised his head again. His expression was bleak, but there was a glint of something sharp in his eyes, something that hadn't been there a moment ago. "So, what's the plan?"

The words caught him off guard. "The plan?"

"Yeah, you know. What's the next step? What do you want me to do?"

"Then…you believe me? About the message?"

"Not exactly, but it's not like I'm doing anything else right now." He gave Walt another one of those mirthless smiles. "My schedule is not exactly packed."

Walt's mind spun. Jesse was prepared to cooperate. This was what he had wanted, wasn't it? But suddenly, his mind was a blank. It took him a few seconds to find his voice. "All right. I-I think we could both use some rest right now. But starting tomorrow morning, we search for the door. Together. We'll do a full sweep of this world. We won't leave any stone unturned. If there _is_ a way out—and there is—we will find it."

Jesse nodded again. A subtle tension eased out of his shoulder. "After breakfast?"

"After breakfast," he agreed.

* * *

There was no door. Jesse knew that.

He wasn't sure if the message from Gale had been a product of Mr. White's pain-addled mind or if it was something he'd made up in an attempt to keep Jesse from slipping deeper and deeper into despair. But he played along because the alternative was to just keep soaking in the pool and looking for creative new ways to kill himself, and that was getting old.

He was sick of trying to run from his pain. He wanted _help_. He wanted the afterlife equivalent of rehab, except it didn't exist. Mr. White's nutty fantasy of escape was the closest thing he had, so he clung to it.

They drew a big map of their little world on the wall of Jesse's living room. They marked every door with a red X and went from house to house, trying them one by one. Predictably, the doors only led to bathrooms or closets or basement stairs. It felt kind of silly. I mean, what were they expecting, exactly?

But he had to admit it was nice to be _doing_ something again.

Once they'd tried every door in the suburbs of Hades with no success, Mr. White announced that the door was probably metaphorical and that they just had to figure out what Gale actually meant. And so they had brainstorming sessions. They wrote down long lists of ideas, most of which were ridiculous. Meditation? Visualization? Like they could just _will_ a way out? But Jesse went with it.

Over the next few days (weeks?) they settled into a routine. They shared Jesse's house. In the morning, they cooked breakfast for each other, and somehow they never ran out of food. If they were down to two eggs one morning, there'd be four more in the carton the next day. They'd been using the same loaf of bread since they first got here; the slices kept multiplying, like gerbils. Because there wasn't much here to do except cook and eat, the meals became more elaborate and creative. Life in hell had started to feel almost normal. Downright domestic.

"Hey," Jesse said one morning. "If we made something together, you think we'd both be able to taste it?"

"You know, that's a good idea," Mr. White said. "I'm surprised I didn't think of it."

So they tried baking a Cap'n Crunch Casserole, a concept that Jesse suggested. He vaguely remembered his Aunt Ginny making something like this for him when he was a kid, but he didn't know what was in it so he had to improvise the recipe. Mr. White followed his instructions. Whenever he expressed doubt, Jesse would insist that this was how Aunt Ginny had done it. They slopped in some milk and eggs and vanilla and syrup—somehow Jesse was positive that the dish contained Mrs. Butterworth syrup—and cooked the whole thing in the oven.

When it emerged half an hour later, they waited for it to cool, and Mr. White ate two bites of it. Jesse studied his expression. "Well?"

"Delicious," he pronounced.

"Are you sure? You're not just saying that?"

"Try it yourself."

Jesse examined the yellow, gelatinous mass. He squinted suspiciously at Mr. White. Then he took a bite and immediately spat it out. "Dude! Gross!" He rinsed his mouth out with a swig of milk and grimaced. "Why didn't you warn me, bitch?"

"Well, Jesse," he replied, poker-faced, "sometimes I can be a bit of an asshole."

They looked at each other. For a few seconds, Mr. White's stony expression held. A smile twitched at the corners of his mouth. And then, in the same instant, they both dissolved into laughter—huge, gut-busting whoops of laughter.

It caught Jesse off guard, almost scared him, it was so sudden. He couldn't remember the last time he'd laughed like that. It felt incredibly good. Like a high, but cleaner and purer. When it finally trailed off, he wiped tears from his eyes and said, "Let's just make some fucking grilled cheese."

It occurred to him that the experiment had worked; they had made something together, and they could both taste it. Was this place trying to send them some kind of message? _Play nice,_ maybe? It was sort of creepy, like their world had a mind of its own. Or not the world—something in it, maybe, controlling things from behind the scenes. God? No, that didn't feel quite right.

Whatever. Philosophy had never been his strong suit. Jesse Pinkman was well aware that he had never been the sharpest crayon in the box. Maybe once upon a time, before he lit up his first joint, he'd had the potential. But from adolescence onward, he'd done everything he could to blunt his developing brain, bombarding his gray cells with every drug known to humankind and dulling his senses with endless hours of TV reruns and videogames. Now his mind was a mess of frayed wires and sputtering bulbs, all gummed up with Dorito crumbs and hardened ranchero sauce. Every so often, those half-lit bulbs produced a flash of insight, but he couldn't count on them.

Still, he kept thinking about that thing Mr. White had said to him. _You weren't dumb at all. If you had just applied yourself..._

The words had taken root somewhere inside him. They were like an itch that wouldn't go away, no matter how hard he scratched.

One morning, rummaging around for fresh boxers, he found a sketchpad and some pencils in the bottom drawer of his dresser. He was pretty sure they hadn't been there before.

At first he ignored them. He hadn't drawn anything for literally a decade. But there was a lot of time to pass, and the two of them couldn't cook and talk about imaginary doors all day. So one afternoon, Jesse picked up the sketchpad and pencils and just started fucking around.

At first it was nothing. Little sketches of clouds or trees or animals. He was out of practice, so he was terrible; his drawings looked like a five-year-old's scribbles. This was exactly what he'd been afraid of, why he had gone so many years without picking up a sketchpad. There were times when he wanted to stop, he was so embarrassed.

But he wasn't planning to show anyone, and there was no meth or videogames or go-carts to distract him, so he just kept doing it. And little by little, he started to draw things that didn't suck. He started to discover that those pathways in his brain, the ones he believed he'd nuked long ago, were not actually gone—just buried under rubble.

After a whole lot of practice, he finally managed to produce something that was actually good: a drawings of an imaginary building, a kind of floating castle with eyes instead of windows. It wasn't like anything he'd drawn before. It had a surreal, kind of eerie quality. But he'd _created_ it. He spent a long time just looking at the image, hardly able to believe that it had come from inside him.

After awhile, his vision started to blur, and he realized that he was crying.

* * *

He kept drawing.

It felt different than it had when he was young. The images that came out of him were strange, often disturbing: Jane in the process of transforming into a tree, branches reaching toward the sky, eyes wide and blank. Andrea lying motionless, eyes closed, a rose growing out of her mouth. A boy's blood-spattered hands cradling a tarantula. Mr. White as a demon, horned and winged, crouched atop a cliff, head tipped back, wailing at the sky as tears trailed down his temples.

He drew a naked body, face hidden in shadow, arms covered with needle tracks, with scrawny dogs tearing away at its flesh, ripping away bloody chunks.

And doors. He became obsessed with drawing doors of every size and shape. His sketches became more and more detailed and more and more numerous. He papered the walls with them, taping them up in overlapping rows.

Mr. White didn't ask him why he'd taken to barricading himself in his room for long stretches of time. He seemed to sense Jesse's need for privacy. But eventually, Jesse scrounged up the courage to show him one of the door drawings. "This is what I've been doing," he said. "In case you were wondering."

Mr. White spread the paper out on the kitchen table and studied it. Jesse waited, hands balled into fists, stomach knotted.

"I don't have an eye for art," Mr. White said at last. "I can't say much about this from a technique standpoint."

Jesse felt a sinking sensation in his chest.

"But just speaking from personal opinion…" He looked up. "This is good. It's very good. I had no idea you were an artist."

"I, um. It's just a hobby." His cheeks burned. "I guess I'm okay."

"I would like to see the rest sometime. If you're willing to show me."

Jesse hesitated. Well, why not? What was he hiding? "Come with me."

He led Mr. White up to his room. For a long time, Walt just stared at the drawings plastered all over the walls. There was a strange expression on his face. And Jesse was suddenly aware that this probably looked like the bedroom of an insane person. He fidgeted.

Slowly, Mr. White walked over to the nearest wall. His gaze fixed on a random sketch of Skyler White's face. Jesse had done it from memory; he was kind of impressed at how well it had turned out, considering he barely knew her and had only seen her in person on a couple of occasions. There was a haunted look in her eyes. Mr. White touched the pencil lines. His eyes were wet with tears. "There are no photos of her in the house," he said. "It's been awhile since I've seen-" His voice caught, breaking off. He cleared his throat. "Could I...could I keep this one?"

"Sure," Jesse whispered.

Mr. White carefully removed the sketch from the wall. He glanced at the one of himself as a demon and raised his eyebrows a little, but didn't remark on it.

"I know," Jesse said. "I know it's weird that I've been locking myself in here, drawing all this trippy shit. You probably think I've gone crazy, but-"

"No, not at all. I'm impressed." He smiled. "Good work, son."

Jesse froze up. His chest seemed to contract, squeezing his heart like a fist. In a flash, he remembered Mr. White calling him _Junior_ as Jesse picked him up off the bathroom floor. Suddenly it was kind of hard to breathe. "I'm not your son."

A few heartbeats of silence passed. Mr. White dropped his gaze. "All right," he said quietly.

 _Why did I say that?_ Mr. White had been complimenting him. But Jesse couldn't shake the feeling that the smiles and the kind words weren't really for him.

He'd heard about this thing that happened when mama dogs lost their pups. They'd carry around a blanket or a stuffed toy or a fuzzy mitten, and they'd lick it and groom it and treat it like it was a puppy, because the real thing was gone and that stupid piece of cloth was all they had. Maybe that was what Jesse was to Mr. White. Just a substitute for the family he'd lost.

* * *

That night, Jesse couldn't sleep. After a lot of tossing and turning, he came down to get a glass of milk (forgetting, for a moment, that he wouldn't be able to taste it if he poured it himself) and when he was in the kitchen, he heard voices from the living room. One was deep and gruff. The other was a woman's. He didn't recognize either voice—but there was something familiar about them, something that tickled a distant part of his memory.

Jesse froze, clutching a glass. He didn't move, didn't breathe. Didn't dare.

What the hell was going on?

He grabbed a steak knife, crept into the living room…and stopped.

The TV was working. On the screen were a pair of animated mice talking to each other. Mr. White was there on the couch, sitting motionless.

"Jesus, man," Jesse said. "You coulda _said_ something. I was freaking out."

"Sorry. I didn't hear you until just now."

Jesse put the knife down and sat next to him on the couch. They watched in silence for a few minutes. The picture quality was lousy, flickering from black and white to color, interrupted by short bursts of static. The sound was even worse, tinny and faint.

"How long has the TV been working?" Jesse asked.

"Just a few minutes." Mr. White was staring intently at the screen, the images reflected in his glasses. "Do you recognize this?"

"Yeah. It's _The Secret of Nimh_." It had been years since he'd seen it, but there'd been a brief period during his childhood when he was obsessed with Don Bluth's movies and tried to copy his art style, before his tastes gravitated toward more off-the-wall, cartoony stuff like Ren and Stimpy. He had probably watched this movie twenty times as a kid. He swallowed, mouth dry. "Any other channels?"

"No. Just this." Mr. White's fingers dug into the couch cushions. His knuckles were white. "What does this mean?"

"I don't know. Maybe nothing." Or maybe this was like the thing with the food. Maybe this place was sending them a message: _Nice work, dudes. Here, have some cartoons._

Mrs. Brisby, the lady mouse, was reading aloud from a book: "You can unlock any door if you only have the key," she said.

Then, abruptly, the images flickered out. For an instant, the screen turned white. It glowed softly. A faint, warbling hum filled the air. And then the glow vanished, and the screen turned to static.

Jesse stared at the blank screen, his own rapid breathing echoing in his ears. This couldn't be coincidence. It could only mean one thing. The door was real. It wasn't just a fever dream. And this place was dangling hints in front of them, teasing them. A key. _What_ key?

Mr. White ought to be crowing like a rooster right now; after all, he'd been proven right. But he was oddly quiet and still. Neither one of them, it seemed, wanted to break the silence. Jesse felt cold inside.

The promise of a way out should have excited him. Instead, it scared him. Why?

There was a saying he'd heard a few times, that most people preferred a known hell to the unknown. They had assumed the door must lead to something good, but the truth was, they had no way of knowing. What came after the afterlife? It could be something wonderful, he guessed. Or it could be something horrible, a more traditional hell with fire and worms and the whole deal.

Or maybe...maybe they would open it and walk through, into white mist, and find themselves back in the same place. Maybe it was all just a cruel trick, a way to give them hope and then yank it away.

"Jesse? Are you all right?"

"Fine," he murmured. But his stomach was a slick knot and his heart was beating too fast. "I'm fine."

-To be continued


	6. Chapter 6

AN: This chapter contains drug use. Changed the rating to M just to be on the safe side.

* * *

Jesse had been moody lately. When they ate together, he was silent, staring off into space, responding to Walt's questions with grunts or monosyllables. Their brainstorming sessions had come to an end. When Walt probed for reasons, Jesse replied, "We've tried pretty much everything, haven't we? What are we supposed to do next?"

"We need to figure out what the key is."

" _What_ key?"

"You heard it too, didn't you? It was a clue. It has to be."

"That? That was nothing. I mean, come on. A line in a cartoon? Aren't we grasping at straws a little here?"

He had been like this ever since the TV started working. Well, "working" was an exaggeration. It showed fragmented images and gurgled out bits of sound between long stretches of static. The bits and pieces didn't amount to any kind of sense; once, it had displayed an infomercial about a set of knives, another time it was a game show in Japanese without subtitles. Not since that first night had it showed them anything of significance…assuming that bit of dialog about the door and key even _had_ any significance. Maybe Jesse was right and it was all random.

But if that was the case, why had he started acting so strangely right after they heard it? He'd been spending even more time barricaded in his room, which wouldn't have been so bad, except that Walt no longer heard the telltale scritch of pencil on paper.

It was almost as if Jesse were frightened by the idea of actually escaping this place.

Walt consoled himself with the knowledge that Jesse hadn't gone back to the pool. At least, not that he knew of.

Then, one evening, he noticed a peculiar smell wafting down from upstairs—vaguely banana-like, almost sweet, but musky at the same time. It was familiar, but he couldn't quite place it. He knocked on the door. "Jesse, may I come in?"

A pause. Then Jesse's voice, dreamy and detached: "Sure."

Walt opened the door. The walls were still papered with Jesse's drawings, though he hadn't done any new ones. Jesse lay on the bed, on his back. Slowly, Walt approached. Jesse's expression was slack, his eyes open and fixed on the ceiling. They were glassy and dilated, the whites faintly pink-tinged and threaded with red.

Walt sat on the edge of the bed. Jesse didn't react, didn't look at him. "Jesse, what's going on?"

Jesse's head turned toward him, and he smiled. "Nothing. I'm good."

The pieces clicked into place, and Walt finally recognized the smell. Pot. "What the—" He spotted the joint in Jesse's hand a second later. A thin curl of smoke rose from one end. "Where did you get that?"

"In the drawer. My lighter's working again, too. Guess I've been a good boy. You want some?"

Walt knocked the joint from his hand. It rolled across the floor. Jesse watched it lazily, but didn't react. "What's the big deal? It's just pot."

"I'll tell you what this is. This is a _distraction._ It's a test. We're being tested." Walt rose to his feet. "What happens if you wake up tomorrow and there's some meth in that drawer? Or—or heroin?"

Jesse rolled his eyes. "I'm already dead. No harm no foul, right?"

"No. You are not going down this road again. I won't let you."

Jesse sighed, eyelids sinking shut.

"Don't tune me out. Look at me."

Jesse folded his arms behind his head and opened one eye.

"You aren't taking this seriously."

"Nope."

Something snapped. He grabbed Jesse's shoulders and gave him a shake. "Listen to me, damn it!"

Jesse's muscles went rigid, and the color drained from his face.

Quickly, Walt released him. "I—I'm sorry."

Jesse sat up and, fumbling, picked the joint from the floor. He raised it to his lips and took a slow drag. His hand trembled. "You're scary, Mr. White." He wasn't smiling. "You know that?"

Walt looked away, shame washing over him. He was still stuck in the same pattern, repeating the same mistakes. Lecturing, threatening. And Jesse was still struggling to escape from himself. When were they going to stop coming back to this place?

"What am I supposed to do, Jesse?" he whispered.

"I don't know," Jesse whispered back.

Walt sighed. Hell, maybe Jesse was right; maybe he was overreacting. He didn't know anything anymore.

"All right," he said on impulse. He held out his hand. "If you're not going to stop, then let me have some."

Jesse blinked a few times. "You serious?"

"Do I sound like I'm joking?"

Jesse hesitated…then passed the joint to Walt. Walt sat down next to him and took a puff. It tickled and itched and burned a path down his throat and into his lungs, and he doubled over, coughing uproariously. His eyes watered. Once the coughing fit had calmed down, he took another drag. The more he smoked, he reasoned, the less there would be for Jesse. He was doing him a favor.

The effects hit him within minutes. His head got a little swimmy, and a curious, buoyant feeling swept over him. Suddenly all he wanted to do was stare at the wall. His thoughts drifted around in his head like loose balloons, bumping into each other and careening off in odd directions. He passed the joint back to Jesse.

They smoked in silence for a few minutes, taking turns. Walt muffled another cough against the back of his hand. "Strong stuff. A lot stronger than what we had when I was in college."

"You smoked weed?"

"Once or twice. It was everywhere back then, but it was never really my thing. I tried it at a party and ended up embarrassing myself because I couldn't stop coughing." He heard himself talking, but had no sense of volition over the words; it was like listening to a recording. Odd. Disconcerting. "When did you start?"

Jesse exhaled a mouthful of smoke and watched it drift toward the ceiling. "I dunno. I was twelve, maybe?"

"Jesus." The word slipped out of him before he could stop it.

Jesse tensed up. "Judgey McJudgerson over here," he muttered. "Like you're so perfect."

"No, I didn't mean—it's not like that." Walt found himself suddenly thinking about his own adolescence, the countless hours he spent sequestered in his room reading or building models or playing with his toy chemistry set, avoiding his peers. Maybe a little pot would have done him good. "It's just…if you picked up your habits that young, I feel like your parents must not have been giving you much guidance."

"Oh, they gave me a shitload of guidance." He smiled, as if it were a joke. "Believe it or not, there was a time when a B on my report card was a big disappointment. I mean, I was in like fourth grade, but still." The smile melted away, and he stared straight ahead. "I had all this potential. Or at least, people seemed to think I did."

"So what changed?" Walt asked.

"I dunno. At some point it was all too much. I was never fucking good enough for them, so what was the point of trying?"

Was that why? Could all of Jesse's problems really be traced back to something so simple?

"They pushed you too hard. So you rebelled against them by becoming a fuckup," Walt said. "Is that it?"

"You wanna play shrink now? Should I get on the couch? Are you gonna like, come up with a theory about how my love of MILFs is actually sublimated mommy issues?"

"I'm just amazed that you know the word 'sublimated,' and yet when we first started cooking, you referred to a barn as a 'cow house.'"

Jesse snorted. "I must be picking up nerd-speak from you."

But that wasn't it, not exactly. _He acts stupider than he really is. Why?_

Jesse exhaled a mouthful of smoke. "Your wife was totally hot, you know. I mean, you wanna talk about MILFs…"

"Jesse," he said, a warning in his tone.

"I'm sayin' you have good taste is all. You got lucky."

"Yeah. I did." Even years after he married Skyler, he sometimes looked at her lying next to him in bed and wondered if she could possibly be real; she seemed too good to be true, certainly too good for him. A spasm of pain shot through his chest, but he ignored it. Wherever his family was right now, whatever they were doing, there was nothing more he could do to help them. Right now, Jesse was his concern. "So," Walt said. "Your parents were very strict, I take it."

Jesse rolled another joint and lit it. "I don't wanna talk about my folks."

"I think it might help if-"

"I disappointed them. End of story." He exhaled and started to raise the joint again. Smoke filled the room, hanging in the air in wisps and coils.

There had been an opening between them a moment ago, but now it was closing, the familiar walls settling back into place. Walt's fingers tightened on the bed sheets. _Say something. Anything._ "My father died when I was very young," he blurted out.

Jesse stopped, the joint hovering an inch from his lips.

Walt drew in a rattling breath and let it out slowly. His lips were numb; his vision had gone a little fuzzy. "My mother raised me. It was very hard for her, working full time while raising a child on her own. But she never complained. She believed in always focusing on the positive side of things. When something went wrong, her solution was to pretend that the problem didn't exist. There was nothing she despised more than whining. So when I was bullied at school, I learned to keep quiet about it. She hardly ever asked about the bruises, and when she did, I would tell her that I fell off my bike, or bumped into a pole. Ridiculous excuses, but she believed them…or pretended to, anyway."

He couldn't stop. The dam had broken, and the words poured out. "Once, I came home with blood leaking out of my ear after having my head slammed into a brick wall. My vision kept blurring. I could barely walk. But even then, I didn't tell her what had happened. I just said that I had the flu and went to bed early. I kept throwing up, feeling these stabbing pains in my skull. I—I couldn't think. I remember lying awake, wondering if I was going to be permanently damaged in some way. I was terrified of losing my intelligence. It was all I had."

He could feel Jesse's gaze on him. At any other time, Walt would have been squirming with terrified self-consciousness, but the pot had blunted his shame-receptors. If that weren't the case, he probably wouldn't have been able to tell Jesse those things at all. He needed drugs to be emotionally open. _I'm pathetic,_ he thought.

His eyes were watering from the smoke. He rubbed them and kept going: "When you and I first started working together—even earlier, when you were in my class—you reminded me of the boys who used to beat me up. Extroverted. Social. Covered with tattoos. And there was always some girl hanging off of your arm. Everything was a game to you, or so it seemed to me, at the time. And I resented that. Maybe…maybe in some way I blamed you for what I went through during my own school years. It makes no sense, I realize." He stopped. Took a breath. "I spent so much of my life feeling powerless. Getting my face smashed into the dirt. You remember what I was like as a teacher, don't you? Even my students walked all over me. Maybe, on some level, I decided it was better to be a monster than a victim. I'm not making excuses for the things I did, or the way I treated you. I just want you to understand…you're not to blame. The reason I was so cruel has nothing to do with you, and everything to do with who I am."

Silence fell over them both. He wondered if Jesse would be disgusted…or maybe it wouldn't surprise him at all. It probably wasn't possible for him to feel more disgust toward Walt than he already did—

"I'm sorry," Jesse said quietly.

Finally, Walt dared to look at Jesse. His expression was difficult to read, but it wasn't the blend of contempt and pity that Walt had expected. Averting his gaze, Jesse picked up a box of tissues from the nightstand. "Here," he murmured, handing it to Walt.

Walt accepted the box and stared at it stupidly for a moment before putting two and two together. Hastily, he grabbed a handful of tissues and mopped at his wet cheeks. He hadn't realized he was crying. "Thank you." His face burned.

He never talked about his past. Not even with Skyler. What was the point of dwelling on the darkness behind him? What good did it do? Better to focus on the things he could change. At least, that's what he'd always believed.

Maybe that had been the great mistake of his life. He had always withheld parts of himself, even from those closest to him. After the cancer diagnosis, his first reaction had been to turn inward, to hide it from his family. What if he'd come home from the doctor and simply told Skyler, _I have cancer—_ what then? He might have avoided that whole nightmare.

 _But then you never would have started working with Jesse._

The room had started to turn slowly around him. He closed his eyes. He felt…odd. His legs had gone numb, and his teeth tingled. His pulse was a dull, heavy thud in his veins.

"Hey," Jesse said, "you okay, man?"

Walt swallowed. "I think I smoked a little too much."

"Here. Lie down." Jesse pushed him down to the bed, onto his back, and pulled the covers up to his chest. "You want some water or something?"

The room still wouldn't stop turning. "No. Just stay with me." After a few seconds, he added in a whisper, "Please."

"No problem." His voice was low and gentle. "I'll stay."

Walt closed his eyes and tried to focus on breathing, but the sensation of spinning was still there, even without sight. His heart was beating too hard, too fast.

"Do something for me," Jesse said. "Recite the, uh—what's it called? The elements chart."

"The periodic table. Why?"

"Just do it."

Walt breathed in. Okay. That was something he could do backwards and in his sleep. "Hydrogen, helium, lithium, beryllium, boron, carbon, nitrogen…" He had to concentrate a little harder than usual. But as the familiar syllables rolled off his tongue, his heartbeat slowed. "Oxygen, fluorine, neon, sodium…magnesium…"

"Good. Keep going."

Just a short while ago, Jesse had been the one talking about his problems, and now suddenly, he was the one comforting Walt. How had things gotten flipped around like this? He tried to remember exactly how the conversation had led to this point, but his thoughts kept sliding away like beads of mercury, and it didn't seem worth the effort to hold onto them, so he just let himself sink into a fuzzy half-trance as he murmured the names of the elements like a prayer. By the time he'd recited the entire periodic table, he was breathing normally.

And it occurred to him, with a sense of wonder, that the burning, scraped-out cancer feeling in his lungs had ebbed considerably. It was a faint shadow of what it had been.

"How are you feeling?" Jesse asked.

"Better. Just…tired." His body felt incredibly heavy, like it might sink straight through the bed. "Think I need a nap."

Jesse tucked him in, as if he were a child. "Go ahead. Get some rest. I won't go anywhere."

* * *

Jesse sat on the edge of the bed, watching Mr. White sleep. He picked his joint up off the nightstand and examined it, then tucked it back into the drawer. Mr. White needed the stuff more than he did. He was probably in pain all the time and just never talked about it.

It seemed really unfair. After you'd died once, you shouldn't have to deal with cancer anymore.

Jesse stretched out on the bed next to him and stared at the ceiling. He was feeling drowsy from the pot, but he kept his eyes open. He didn't want to doze off. He'd been having the worst dreams lately, and he'd been remembering things—things he didn't want to think about. The pool didn't help anymore. When he'd opened the drawer and found the pot there, a wave of mingled disappointment and relief had washed over him.

The grass was green, the ocean was wet, and Jesse Pinkman was a druggie. Apparently, that fact had followed him even into the afterlife. When he'd lit up that joint, it was not with excitement so much as a sense of resignation. And then Mr. White had barged in, and then…

Something had changed between them, something he couldn't quite figure out. It had surprised Jesse, and left him a little shaken. It was strange thinking about Mr. White as a kid. But all that stuff about the bullies, and his mom…that did kind of explain a lot.

A loud hacksaw-like buzz broke the silence, and Jesse gave a start, looking over at his partner. Another buzz, coupled with a faint wheeze. Jesse almost laughed.

He was a snorer. It figured.

He closed his eyes, relaxing.

The sound of Mr. White's snoring had grown predictable and almost relaxing, like waves on the shore, and in spite of himself, Jesse began to drift off.

* * *

When Walt awoke, the sky outside the window was dark. There were a few stars, twinkling dimly against the blackness. That was new. He was certain there had never been stars.

Wait. Why was he in Jesse's bed?

He yawned widely, turned his head…and saw Jesse stretched out beside him, sleeping.

That's right. Jesse had agreed to stay with him. Walt's memory was still fuzzy, but he knew he'd said a lot of things to Jesse, told him things that he'd never told anyone. All it had taken was a few puffs of marijuana to lower his defenses, and everything had come spilling out. It was frightening, how little it had taken to peel away his barriers. Maybe, deep down, he'd _wanted_ it to happen.

But Jesse hadn't judged him for it.

Walt tried to remember the last time he had seen his partner asleep. It was a cliché, he supposed, but he looked so much younger with the lines smoothed out of his face. Peaceful. For a few minutes, Walt just watched him. He could see Jesse's eyes rolling beneath the lids as he dreamed.

Then a tiny furrow appeared in Jesse's forehead, and his eyebrows twitched. "No," he murmured.

Walt frowned. "Jesse?"

Jesse didn't react. His breathing had started to quicken. "No. Please…don't…" His eyelids quivered, and a tear slipped out from underneath one, trailing down the side of his nose.

"Jesse." Walt laid a hand on his shoulder.

Jesse's eyes snapped open. He was gasping, eyes wet with tears. "Mr. White? What—"

"You were having a bad dream."

Jesse looked down, quickly wiping the tears from his face. "Did I—did I say anything?"

Walt hesitated. "No, not really."

Jesse's lips pressed together in a thin, pale line. He sat up, turning away, and climbed out of bed. Walt watched as he rummaged through the drawer, withdrew a bag of weed and rolled yet another joint.

"Are you sure you want to do that?" Walt asked, keeping his tone carefully neutral. He felt like a hypocrite for even asking; he'd smoked some himself, after all.

"I'm sure." He lit up and inhaled slowly. His hands were shaking.

Walt suddenly remembered the way Jesse had frozen up when he grabbed his shoulders, the way his eyes had gone wide and glassy with panic. He tried to remember if Jesse had ever reacted to him that way before.

Walt found himself thinking back to his last night on Earth—the night he'd gone there to save Jesse, looked into those haunted blue eyes.

Jesse was a shattered person. It was easy to forget that, at times. Walt did not want to guess at what he'd endured in that place, but it had probably been worse—far worse—than anything Walt had been through. People didn't instantaneously recover from things like that. They needed therapy, not to mention support from loved ones, and Jesse had had neither.

No wonder he was still having nightmares.

"Listen, son…" Walt trailed off, unsure exactly what he wanted to say.

Jesse glanced at him, his expression flat and empty. "I don't want to talk about it." His gaze shifted away. "Sorry. Nothing personal. It's just—it's not something I want to go into."

"All right."

They sat in awkward silence for a moment.

"Would you rather be alone?" Walt asked. "I can go sleep on the couch, if—"

"No," Jesse said immediately. He drew in a shaky breath, then said again, quieter—"No. I don't want to be alone right now. I don't want to go back to sleep."

"Do you want to take a walk together? We've been spending a lot of time in the house lately. Some fresh air might do us good."

Jesse shook his head and took another drag. His shaky little breaths echoed through the silence. "I can't feel it. Why can't I feel it?"

"What?"

"The pot. It's not doing anything." He flung the joint across the room, and it bounced off the wall and rolled across the floor. Jesse pressed the heels of his hands against his eyelids. A short, choked sob escaped his throat.

Walt lay a hand on his partner's back and felt him trembling. Jesse tensed up a little, but didn't pull away. "Is there anything I can do?" Walt asked.

For a few seconds, Jesse was silent. Then he said, very quietly, "Will you make some hot chocolate for me?"

"Of course."

* * *

In the kitchen, Walt heated the cocoa over the stove while Jesse sat at the kitchen table, staring blankly into space. The expression on his face—or lack thereof—was troubling. The phrase _disassociative state_ flashed through Walt's head.

The cocoa had begun to bubble. He turned off the heat and ladled the mixture into two cups, which he carried to the table.

Jesse turned his hands over and stared at his own wrists. When Walt sat down and pushed one of the cups toward him, he didn't react; just kept studying the tracery of blue veins under his skin.

"Here," Walt said.

No reaction.

"Jesse?"

He was stroking a finger down his own wrist—slowly, pensively. "It's weird that there are no scars," he murmured. It was the first thing he'd said since his request for cocoa.

"What?" Walt's mouth had gone dry.

He gave his head a shake. "Sorry." He raised the mug of cocoa to his lips and took a small sip. His face was drawn and pale.

Walt shifted uneasily in his chair. "Why would there be scars?"

"Look, forget I said anything."

Before, Walt might have accepted that answer. He knew better now. "I know that something's been bothering you for awhile now. I think—I think maybe we should talk about it."

The muscles of his throat constricted as he swallowed. "I don't think you want to hear it, man." His fingers tightened on the mug. "It's not pretty."

"Whatever you're afraid to tell me, it can't possibly be worse than the things that I've done."

Jesse closed his eyes. For a long moment, he said nothing. "I told you I ODed. That wasn't true, but I didn't actually remember what happened until just a few days ago. Maybe I didn't want to remember." Jesse stared at his own arm. "I took a broken piece of glass and just-" He ran a finger slowly down the length of it, from his wrist to his elbow. "It was easy. Like cutting through butter."

For a few seconds, Walt couldn't find his voice. His throat hurt. "Why?" he whispered.

"Why do you think? I was a homeless junkie. I couldn't sleep for more than two hours without being woken up by nightmares. There was no one in the world left alive who gave a shit about me."

"No one?"

"I tried to call my mom once, a few days before I iced myself. But I guess they'd changed their number. I got some stranger. I don't think I would've been able to face my parents anyway. I wouldn't want them or Jake to see what I'd become." His eyes drifted out of focus again. "That last year, after you died…do you know what I did for cash? Do you know how I survived?"

Walt hesitated. "You went back to cooking meth." It made sense; it was the only thing he could think of, anyway.

But Jesse shook his head. "By the time I got out of that place, I'd decided I'd rather die than cook again. Besides, I didn't have a lab or a partner or any money for supplies, so it wasn't even an option, really. Where would I start? It's not like I could get a real job either. I wasn't exactly quality employment material to begin with, and after everything that happened, I was such a fucking mess that most places wouldn't even let me in the front door." Jesse took another sip of cocoa and licked the foam from his lower lip. The gesture was strange, incongruously casual, but his hand was shaking noticeably. "So what else was I gonna do? What else did I have left to sell?"

Walt's chest tightened as he realized what Jesse was saying. Of course. The only thing he'd had left was himself.

"Are you gonna make me spell it out for you, Mr. White?"

"No," Walt said, very quietly. "I understand."

Jesse bowed his head, cradling it in his hands. "At first I hated it. Then after awhile, I just…didn't care. I didn't care about anything except the drugs, because that was the only way I could get through the day. I'd go numb. It felt like it was happening to someone else. Like I was kind of floating outside myself. You know? It was almost funny sometimes, watching the things I did for drugs." He picked absently at his thumbnail. "After everything Jack and the gang did to me, I guess I'd had plenty of practice at detaching. Though some of my customers made Jack look like Mr. Rogers by comparison. I got all the twisted ones, the ones who got off on hurting people, because they knew I'd let them do whatever." He smiled, though there was a terrible deadness in his eyes. "People can smell desperation, you know. It's like blood in the water. All the sharks come swarming in, and they all want to rip away a piece of you." The smile melted. "They didn't care if I cried. Some of them liked it."

 _Some of them liked it._

Walt's heartbeat thundered in his head. Heisenberg reared up inside him like a demon, all cold steel and flaming blue eyes. He wanted to hunt down everyone who had ever hurt Jesse, ever made him cry, and kill them all with his bare hands.

But the terrible irony was that he was one of them. He was part of the reason Jesse had been driven to that point. Walt had destroyed him, had turned him over to Jack and his gang, and they had torn him apart and left him in ruins.

"I kinda feel like that's how I was meant to end up all along." Jesse took another sip of cocoa, his expression oddly calm. "Like I said. Some people are born losers."

Walt struggled to keep his voice calm and even, despite the rending pain in his heart: "That is not true, Jesse. That is not how you were meant to end up. You did not deserve to be used like that."

Jesse's hand tightened on the mug. "Yes. I did."

"No. The things that happened, the people who died, none of that was your fault."

Jesse lunged to his feet, so quickly that he knocked over the cocoa, spilling it across the table. He didn't seem to notice. He was breathing hard, chest heaving, eyes wild. " _Look at me!_ I have no fucking excuses. I wasn't born in some crack house in the ghetto. I wasn't abused as a kid, I wasn't poor, I wasn't even really that dumb, I just didn't _try,_ because I was a spoiled little bitch! There are people in this world with real problems, people who get hooked on drugs because their lives are actually genuinely fucking _hard!_ I started out with every advantage in the world, and I blew it. I'm selfish and worthless and pathetic and—" He pressed a hand to his mouth, as if that were the only way he could stop the words from coming out. He was shaking, eyes wet with tears.

Walt stood and approached Jesse. Jesse tensed as Walt reached up, framing his partner's face between his hands. "Jesse," he said, his voice low and firm. "Jesse, look at me. Look and listen closely, because I want these words to sink deep into your mind."

Breathing hard, Jesse jerked backward, balking. There was a glint of panic in his eyes; they rolled like a frightened horse's, showing white. "I don't want a fucking _speech_."

Walt held firm, anchoring Jesse's face between his palms. "We both made mistakes. Terrible mistakes. I won't deny that. Neither one of us made the best choices in life. But you are _not_ a bad person, Jesse, and I would not say that if I didn't believe it with my entire heart."

"Bullshit," he spat. "You think you have to say that, you think it's your job to save me, but you're wrong." He was breathing faster, almost hyperventilating. A choked sob escaped him. "There's nothing left to save."

"You loved them, didn't you?" Walt said quietly, holding Jesse's gaze. "You loved Jane and Andrea and Brock, and you loved your parents and your brother and you loved your ridiculous friends. You never once stopped caring. You did everything in your power to protect innocent people, and when you couldn't, you felt their deaths deep in your soul, while I was too busy chasing money and power to even notice the people I hurt. You tried to see the best in others. Even me. You gave me your loyalty and your friendship even when I didn't deserve it, even when I used you and insulted you and forced you to do horrible things. Maybe you don't see the good in yourself, and maybe your parents didn't see it, but _I_ do. I am here now to tell you that you're worth something. I'll say it as many times as it takes, until you believe it. You deserve better than being trapped in this empty world. And I am never, ever, ever giving up on you. Not if we're here for a million years."

Jesse's eyes were wide, stunned. Tears spilled down his cheeks. Then he laughed—a strangled, broken sound. "You are the most stubborn motherfucker I have ever known."

"You bet I am." Walt smiled. There were tears in his own eyes, too.

He pulled Jesse into a hug. Jesse buried his face against Walt's shoulder and clung to him.

Walt rubbed his back. "Let it out, son."

"I'm not crying," Jesse said, his voice muffled. Tears soaked through Walt's sweater.

After a few minutes, he pulled back and wiped a sleeve across his face. There was a complicated expression on his face—relief, embarrassment, uncertainty. His eyes were red and puffy, his cheeks wet. He glanced at the spilled hot cocoa congealing on the tabletop. "Sorry."

"Don't worry about it." He hesitated, eyes searching his partner's face. "Are you okay, Jesse?"

"Yeah. Kind of. I don't know."

Walt guided him over to the couch and pushed gently down on his shoulders until he sat. He sat down next to him and studied his face. Jesse was still a little pale. Walt placed a hand on his back, letting it rest between his shoulder blades.

"Can't believe I told you all that stuff," Jesse said. "I mean…shit."

"You needed to talk about it."

"Guess so." He sniffled and wiped at his eyes. "I feel...different. Lighter." After a moment, he said softly, "Thank you."

"You're welcome."

Silence settled over them. But it was a comfortable silence. It felt as though some old, deep wound between them had finally begun to heal.

Maybe that's why they were here. Maybe this wasn't the afterlife equivalent of prison, but more like a sort of halfway house. Rehab of the soul. He wanted to believe that. That even after all the ugly things they had done, all the pain they had caused and endured, there was still something waiting for them on the other side of darkness.

"Hey," Jesse said. "Do you feel that?"

"Feel what?"

Then he looked at his hand, still resting on Jesse's back, and saw that something was wrong. The outline of Jesse's form had softened, growing blurred; Walt's fingers had partially sunk into his back, as if he were made of semisolid smoke. He yanked his hand back, startled.

Jesse held up his hands. They'd grown faintly transparent. He turned them back and forth, his eyes widening. "What the hell?"

He was fading, growing fainter and fainter.

"Jesse!" Walt tried to grab his hand, but there was nothing there. _"Jesse!"_

Only silence answered. Just like that, Jesse Pinkman was gone, as if he had never existed, and Walt was alone in an empty living room.

* * *

Jesse opened his eyes and blinked, dazed. He was lying on his back, on the floor, blinded by light. Slowly, he sat up. His eyes stung as they adjusted to the brightness.

He was in a vast white room. It was a bigger than a house, bigger than an entire city block. The walls stretched for what felt like miles; he couldn't see where they ended. Everything glowed with a faint luminescence that came from nowhere and everywhere.

"What the _fuck?_ " He climbed to his feet. "Mr. White! Hey!" His voice echoed through the silence.

Then a voice spoke from all around him. _"Welcome._ "

The voice was neither male nor female, young nor old. It was clear and pure and had a distinctly alien quality. At the same time, there was something familiar about it.

Jesse turned in a circle, head tilted back. "Where are you?"

" _I am nowhere and everywhere. I transcend physical boundaries."_

Jesse squinted. "Well, can you like, make yourself visible?"

 _"I could._ "

"Then do it! I don't know where to look. I feel like I'm talking to the air here."

 _"As you wish."_

At first, there was only silence and stillness. Then, peering through the white glow that seemed to saturate the air like mist, he glimpsed a human figure walking toward him. As the figure drew closer, it resolved itself into a recognizable form, and Jesse's chest constricted.

He looked just as Jesse remembered him. Short, curly hair. White button-down jacket, the first few buttons undone to reveal a faded Far Side t-shirt beneath. Purple bandana tied around his neck.

Gale Boettiger smiled. "Hello, Jesse."

-To be continued


	7. Chapter 7

Jesse felt the blood drain from his face. Instantly, he was back in that moment, standing in the doorway to Gale's apartment, pistol aimed. The gunshot echoed through his head. He remembered the way the life had blinked out of Gale's eyes, the thud of his body hitting the floor like a bag of hamburger. Just like that, in a split second, Jesse had killed a man.

And now that man was standing in front of him, whole and smiling.

"Are you…" Jesse's voice came out weak and breathless. "Are you really him?"

"I am him," Gale said. "And I am more."

Jesse's ears were ringing. He couldn't think straight. His breathing quickened.

Gale took a step forward, toward him. He reached out and touched Jesse's cheek. His fingers were warm; he didn't feel like a corpse. Still, Jesse flinched. Then, a half-second later, his mind went blank. A heavy calm settled over him like a wool blanket, smothering his panic. But the guilt remained, a dull ache in his center. "I'm sorry," he whispered.

"I know," Gale said gently. He lowered his hand.

Jesse gulped. Warm tears swarmed his eyes, blurring his vision. "You don't hate me?"

"No. What would be the point? Nothing I might do to you could equal the pain you've already inflicted on yourself. How many times did you relive that moment? How many nights did you lie awake, wondering if I'd felt the pain of the bullet entering my head?"

Jesse let out a shaky breath. His cheek still tingled lightly where Gale—if this really _was_ Gale—had touched him.

 _He knows that. How does he know that?_

"You're clearly overwhelmed," Gale said. "Would you like to sit down?"

A half-second later, there was a sleek glass-topped table and a curved, eggshell-white chair in front of Jesse. A strange device of flasks and tubes appeared on top of it; it looked like something out of a meth lab.

"I could make some coffee, if you like," Gale said. "Not to toot my own horn, but I've been told my coffee is excellent."

Jesse remained where he was. "I'm fine."

"Well, I hope you don't mind if I have some, in that case." Gale took a seat. The device was dripping coffee into a mug with the words FULL FRONTAL NERDITY printed across the side. He picked it up, took a sip, and let out a sigh. "The little pleasures never change, do they? The flesh may be gone, but the mind remembers. Perhaps the mental experience is more pure than any reality could live up to."

Jesse stood back, watching him warily. It was unnerving, just how totally calm Gale seemed. If Jesse were in his shoes, facing a man who'd shot him to save his own skin, he sure as hell wouldn't be so chill about it. Was this whole Zen-like forgiveness thing for real, or was it part of some plan?

"There's no plan," Gale said. "Scout's honor."

Shit. The guy could read his thoughts? Jesse tensed, feeling an absurd urge to cover himself, or maybe hide under something. "Stop that."

"Hm? Oh. My apologies. On the upper levels, we mostly communicate through thought. It's easy to slip up, but I will endeavor not to read anything that you don't want me to see."

"Uh...thanks." Of course, Jesse had no way to know if he was telling the truth or not.

Apparently, Gale knew who he was and what he'd gone through. The idea that Gale had been observing him all this time-not just his experiences, but his thoughts and feelings too-was freaky as hell. Could dead people watch you while you were on the toilet, or masturbating? He pushed the thought away. He had bigger things to worry about. "Just a minute ago, I was with the living room with Mr. White. So what happened? Where is he?"

"Right where you left him. He is safe, no worries. As for what happened, it's very simple. You found the door. It's as I told you; any door can be opened with the proper key. It was inside you, all along."

"That doesn't really explain a lot." Jesse crossed his arms over his chest, fingers digging into his biceps. "Just why are you here? What _are_ you?"

Gale raised his eyebrows. "I'm not a what. I'm a who."

"Yeah, but...you know what I mean."

Slowly, he set down his coffee mug and interlaced his fingers on the table. He tapped his thumbs together thoughtfully. "There are many terms I could use. Guide, sponsor, patron, psychopomp. Thanatological midwife, perhaps."

Jesse stared blankly.

"Essentially, I volunteered to supervise your transition." His eyes held a strange, dim glow deep within, Jesse noticed—like the sheen of moonlight on water. "This is, you might say, the antechamber to the next level."

A chill climbed down the ladder of Jesse's spine. "And what's the next level?"

"Words are inadequate, I'm afraid. Some might call it heaven. I prefer the Buddhist concept of Nirvana, personally. But whatever works for you. Ultimately, our reality defies any lingual or cultural constructs from the human world; they are merely approximations. But it will be beautiful. I can promise you that."

Jesse found himself thinking about the church he'd attended as a kid, wondering what the pastor with his hellfire sermons would think about all this. Jesse wasn't even sure what he thought about it himself. It felt too easy. After everything he'd done, all the lives he'd destroyed, all he had to do was accept himself, and he got a free ticket to paradise? There had to be a catch, something he wasn't seeing.

A thought occurred to him. He swallowed, his throat suddenly tight. "Aunt Ginny...will she be there?"

"Of course."

"Andrea?" His voice came out breathless and faint. "Jane?"

"They are waiting for you."

 _Jane._ Her smile flashed through his head. He could hold her again, breathe in her scent. They could be together. This was what he had wanted, wasn't it?

"Are they..." The words wobbled a little as he struggled to control his tone. "Are they angry at me?"

"Why would they be angry?"

"Because I..." He couldn't bring himself to finish the sentence. Not out loud. _Because it's my fault they're dead. Everything is my fault._ "You know what happened," he muttered.

"I know, yes." He was silent for a moment, studying Jesse with those unearthly eyes that seemed to stare through him like an X-ray machine.

Somehow, the gentleness in Gale's expression just made it harder. He almost _wanted_ the guy to get angry at him, to call him a murderer and a coward.

"Are you sure you don't want coffee?" Gale asked. "I find that a little bit of normality is helpful, in times like these."

Jesse hesitated, then shook his head. "I'm okay."

"Very well, then." He stood. The table and chair vanished, along with the coffeemaker, though the cup of coffee in Gale's hand remained. He stretched out the other hand. "Are you ready, Jesse Pinkman?"

He blinked. "For what?"

"To ascend."

"Wait. Like _now?_ "

"What better time is there?"

This was all happening too fast. He _wasn't_ ready. He had never felt less ready in his life. His thoughts spun. But one kept rising to the surface:

 _You could see her again. You could see all of them._

A pang of longing filled him, so powerful it made him dizzy. He thought about the morning after Jane's death, the awful, cold horror of waking up next to her corpse, the months of agony and mourning. He'd thought that empty space inside him would never be filled again. And now, Gale was telling him that everyone he'd ever lost was right there, waiting to welcome him back with open arms.

Would it even _be_ her? Maybe she'd be like Gale-Jane, yet somehow more than Jane. And Andrea...would it be weird having both of them there? Or were they too spiritually evolved on the next level to be bothered by stuff like that?

"The answers to all your questions and more are waiting," Gale said. "Just follow me."

He started to reach out...then stopped. "What about Mr. White?"

Gale hesitated. A shadow slipped across his expression. "It is not his time." He looked away. "Walter's sins—to put it in spiritual terms—are considerable. He has a lot more to work through. Self-hatred, pride, shame, emotional repression, layers upon layers of self-deception. You should see the way his mind is organized." He said it in the same tone an exasperated parent might say, _You should see what a mess his room is._ "He has made a _science_ out of self-deception."

"Yeah, well, I coulda told you that. But so what? Right now he's probably really confused and scared, because you decided to beam me up to this giant-ass waiting room without even bothering to ask first."

Another pause. "I don't make the rules, Jesse."

"You're saying you can't bring him up?"

Gale shook his head.

The guilt, confusion and fear were all still there in a tangle knot inside his chest, but for the first time since waking up, Jesse felt something else-a hot flicker of anger. He clung to it, fed it. It was better than the alternatives. "What? You'll get punished or something? Is there a Gus Fring archangel on the next level, waiting to ice anyone who steps out of line with his Holy Box Cutter?"

"It isn't like that. There's no hierarchy here. No one is punished. It simply can't be _done._ "

"Well, why not?"

"Because he isn't _ready_." For the first time, a hint of emotion-frustration-crept into Gale's voice. He stopped and breathed in, as if composing himself. "Trying to bring him up would be like...like breaking open a caterpillar's cocoon before it's finished transforming. It would destroy him."

This...this wasn't right. He couldn't _leave_ Mr. White. "Then let me go back. Let me stay with him until he's ready."

Gale shook his head. "That wouldn't work, either. You can't stuff a butterfly back into its cocoon."

Jesse paced, running his hands through his hair. "Okay, well, I'll wait here then. How long is it gonna take?"

"I don't know. It might be another month. It might be a century. Or longer."

Jesse's stomach dropped. "Longer?"

"You must understand, my job is merely to guide and supervise. I don't control what happens or when. _You_ made the decision to let go of your past and forgive yourself. No one can do that for you. In fact, when more advanced spirits interfere too much, it can actually hinder the process. It must be a choice, freely made for no ulterior purposes."

"But that's not fair! He helped _me_. Who's going to help him? Can you—I don't know. Can you like, go down there yourself? Or send someone?"

Gale looked at him sadly. "If I could, I would. You may find it difficult to believe, but I care about Walter, too. He was my friend, a man I greatly admired...even if things didn't end so well between us. I would like nothing more than to help him. But it doesn't work that way."

Jesse gritted his teeth. He didn't trust those mournful brown puppy eyes. Gale was hiding something, holding something back, he was sure of it. "I'm not going anywhere without Mr. White. You said we're in control of what happens to us, right? Well, that's _my_ choice. There's got to be some way."

Gale's fingers tightened, almost imperceptibly, around the handle of his mug. "Jesse—I told you, it is not within my power. You must accept that certain things can't be changed—"

"Bullshit! You're a fucking magical spirit! You're telling me there's _nothing_ you can do?" He glared at Gale. "Walt is my _partner._ So if you want me, you gotta take him too. Bitch."

Gale's expression turned cool and empty, as if his face had suddenly become a mask. A bead of sweat trickled down Jesse's back. For a moment he wondered if he'd made a mistake, crossed a line. Maybe he'd just blown his own chances as well as Mr. White's; maybe Gale would snap his fingers and Jesse would burst into fire, or melt into a puddle of screaming human goo. As the silence stretched on, his heart beat faster and faster.

Gale took a slow, thoughtful sip of coffee and licked his lips. "You want to rescue him," he said. "Is that it?"

"Yes. That's what I want. You-you're saying there's a way?"

"It is possible. Theoretically. But it would be risky."

"We're already dead. What do we have to lose?"

But even as the question left his mouth, Jesse knew better. There were fates much worse than death.

"When you try to force a transition," Gale said, "the usual rules don't apply. Things become…unpredictable. Volatile. If you go back for him, you could become trapped in a prison of your own memories, or his, with no hope of escape."

Jesse balled his hands into fists, nails digging into the meat of his palms. He found himself thinking about the pit...the endless hours spent in that dark hole, crying quietly to himself and knowing that no one heard, no one cared. The gnawing hunger. The cold. The knowledge that when his captors came, he would be too weak to fight them. He would do whatever they wanted. That was what he remembered, more than anything; the completely and utter helplessness. The despair. Could he end up stuck in a place like that forever?

For a moment, Jesse wondered if he was crazy to even think about going back. Maybe he should let Mr. White work through his own shit. He'd get out on his own eventually. Right?

 _Focus on yourself._ They used that line in rehab a lot. Recovering addicts weren't supposed to get too mixed up in each other's shit. It became a distraction, trying to help others when you were too screwed up to even look after yourself.

Maybe it was good advice for junkies. But after awhile, that line started to feel too much like a mantra. Too much like an excuse to just not care.

Jesse's worst nightmare was Mr. White's reality. He was alone in that cold, empty place, nothing to do but replay his own memories. No one grew or changed when he was alone. If Jesse abandoned him now, they'd probably never see each other again. And he knew from experience-being abandoned was the worst thing in the world.

Jesse looked Gale in the eye. "I'll do it. Whatever I have to do. I don't care about the risk."

Gale didn't seem surprised. "Think carefully. You are potentially turning down a chance to be reunited with your loved ones—to be happy, to be at peace. All that for a man who lied to you, manipulated you-"

"I don't give a fuck. You really think I'm gonna skip town and abandon my partner? I'm not a pussy, yo."

Gale let out a small sigh. "I thought you might say that."

Suddenly there was a set of steel doors standing upright next to Gale. No wall or anything, just doors. "Go then," Gale said. "Retrieve him, if you can."

Jesse walked slowly around the doors. From the other side, there was nothing there. It was like some weird optical illusion. It made his head hurt. He circled back around again, and they reappeared. He touched a finger to the cold metal. "So like, where will this take me? Back to that place?"

"Not exactly." He paused. "The truth is, even I'm not sure what you'll find on the other side. But I can tell you this: when you get there, you need to locate Walter and convince him to accompany you. Bring him back through the door. Do it quickly, because the door may not stay there for long."

"Right." Jesse dried his sweat-damp palms on his pants.

"Be warned, he may not come willingly. There is no prison stronger or more difficult to escape than the prisons people build for themselves. And, as I am sure you are aware, Walter White is a very stubborn man."

"Tell me about it," Jesse muttered.

He still didn't really understand any of this. But thinking too much and trying to figure this out would only make this harder. He studied the doors, but there were no knobs or latches, no way to open them. "So how do I—"

The doors slid open, revealing the clean and ordinary-looking interior of an elevator. The floor was carpeted in faded blue, the walls beige. Jesse swallowed, mouth dry. This was it. _Find Mr. White. Convince him to leave._ How hard could it be?

"Good luck, Jesse."

"Thanks." He hesitated, feeling suddenly awkward and uncertain. "I really am sorry. For what I did. You didn't deserve that. I mean...I guess I didn't know you, really. But you seem like a nice guy."

A slight smile softened Gale's face. "So do you."

 _I'm not, though. Not at all._

Jesse braced himself and stepped into the elevator. The doors slid smoothly shut.

After a moment, the elevator started to move. There were no numbers, but he could tell from the sinking feeling in his stomach that it was going down. He stood there for what felt like a very long time, until finally, the elevator halted with a lurch, and the door slid open, revealing…a playground?

The sky was a flat, cloudy white, the air misty. Trees loomed, dim shapes in the fog. A swing swung back and forth, rusted chains squeaking. There was a slide, a set of monkey bars, a jungle gym, and one of those wooden horses on a spring...but no kids. No one around at all.

Jesse stepped forward, out of the elevator. Wood chips crunched under his feet. When he looked over his shoulder, the elevator doors were still there; the sight reassured him. This place was seriously creepy.

He walked forward, through the playground. Beads of water glistened on the bars of the jungle gym. He touched the metal, and his hand came away wet with condensation.

What _was_ this place?

"Hello?" he called. His voice echoed through the silence. The swing squeaked.

He decided it was more sad than creepy. Something about empty playgrounds always made him feel lonely.

Then he noticed a little boy, maybe five or six, sitting alone in the corner of the playground—a little boy with mouse brown hair, a white button-down shirt, and blue shorts. He was playing with Tinker Toys. He didn't look up; he didn't seem to notice Jesse. Or maybe he was deliberately ignoring him.

"Holy shit," Jesse whispered.

It was him. It had to be. But it was just so fucking _weird_ seeing Mr. White as a little kid. He was so...tiny.

He raised his voice. "Yo, Mr. White! That you?"

The boy flinched and hunched his skinny shoulders. Still, he didn't look up.

Jesse approached. "Hey. Are you—"

"Stop," he said in a small, soft voice.

Jesse froze and looked down. The kid had arranged some of his Tinker Toys in a circle around himself, linking them up so they formed a sort of fence. Jesse had almost stepped on it. "Oh. Sorry." He took a step back.

The boy lowered his head and returned to building whatever he was building.

"Hey…" Jesse cleared his throat. "Uh. Can we talk?"

"You can stay, if you want," the boy said in his soft, almost inaudible voice. "But you have to sit outside the circle." He pointed to his fence of Tinker Toys.

"How come?"

"This is my place. No one can come inside."

"Oh. Okay." If it was a game, he could play along. Jesse sat down on the woodchips and folded his arms over his knees. He wondered what he was supposed to _do,_ exactly. But he had the clear sense that he couldn't rush this. He glanced over his shoulder again, assuring himself that the door was still there. "Doesn't it get lonely, staying in there all the time? Aren't you bored?"

The boy didn't respond.

"Walt," Jesse said. "Your name is Walt, right?"

"My mom says I'm not supposed to talk to strangers."

Jesse hesitated. "Well, sure, but we aren't strangers. My name's Jesse. We're partners. Remember?"

Mr. White—Walt—froze, clutching one of the wooden toys. His fingers tightened around it, knuckles turning white. "You shouldn't be here." He whispered the words, as if afraid of being overheard.

"Why not?" When Walt didn't answer, Jesse said, "Hey. Are you okay?"

Slowly, Walt raised his head. When Jesse saw his face, his stomach tightened. There was a ring of dark, bruised flesh around one eye and a gash on his cheek. The skin around it was discolored, mottled purple and brown.

 _Jesus_. Just looking at the injury left Jesse feeling cold and sickened. "Who did that to you?"

Walt's expression tightened, and his gaze jerked away. "No one." His lower lip quivered a little, and he bit down on it, hard. "I fell."

He remembered what Mr. White had told him earlier, about how he'd gotten beat up at school. But Jesse had imagined it happening to him in high school. He'd never guessed it had started this young. Jesse was already starting to get that achey, twisty feeling in his chest he got whenever he saw a little kid scared or in pain. "You don't have to lie, you know. Not to me."

Walt's eyes were a bright, startling green, and wet with tears. They were eyes that Jesse knew well, and yet utterly unfamiliar, staring at him out of that small, innocent face.

Jesse smiled, trying to look nonthreatening. Walt didn't seem to want to talk about the bruises, so Jesse tried to think of a way to change the subject. He glanced down at the array of Tinker Toys, linked together in vaguely familiar shapes that made him think of chemistry class. "Those are molecules, right?"

Walt tensed up. His hand drifted to his face and touched the bruise on his cheek.

"Hey, it's cool. There's nothing wrong with liking science stuff. Actually it's pretty awesome. I used to think it was lame, but that's just 'cause I was a dumb-ass."

The corners of Walt's mouth twitched upward. It was the faintest shadow of a smile, but it was something.

Encouraged, Jesse said, "You wanna hear a science joke?"

Walt nodded.

"You know where noble gases come from?"

"Where?"

"Emperors' farts."

Another tiny twitch of a smile. "That's silly."

"It's a joke, dude. You can smile, y'know...it doesn't hurt, I promise." And then he realized-with those bruises on Walt's face, it actually might hurt. He wished he had something to give him for that. An ice-pack, or bandages. Anything.

Walt lowered his head and resumed playing with his Tinker Toys, breaking them apart and linking them together again.

Jesse cleared his throat. "Hey...how about we get out of here?"

"To where?"

"I dunno. Somewhere better. This place…there's nothing here, man. It's all just ghosts." He gestured to the trees, the abandoned playground equipment.

"I can't leave."

"Sure you can." He felt kind of skeevy, trying to lure a kid off of a playground. Even if that kid was actually his fifty-year-old former chemistry teacher, and this playground didn't even technically exist. "I mean, you're not happy here, are you?"

Walt froze. For a long moment, he didn't move, didn't speak. Then he started to shake. He sniffled and rubbed at his eyes.

"Hey…" Jesse's voice softened. He started to stretch out a hand. As soon as his fingertips extended past the circle of toys, a burning, prickling pain rushed down his arm, and he yanked it back, breath hissing between his teeth.

Walt's head snapped up, eyes widening.

Jesse looked down at his fingertips, which had reddened and blistered.

"I warned you," Walt said. His breathing had quickened. He scooted backwards. "Don't come any closer. Or I'll hurt you more." It didn't sound like a threat. He sounded scared. His voice hitched, as if he were about to break down into tears.

"It's okay," Jesse said. He blew on his stinging fingers. "No biggie. Nothing some band-aids won't fix."

"You should go." Walt balled his hands into trembling fists and pressed them against his temples as he huddled on the ground. "I'm bad. I hurt everyone."

"That's not true."

Walt had started to rock back and forth, his eyes squeezed tightly shut, tight little white-knuckled fists still pressed against his head. "Go. Now. Before it's too late."

Overhead, thunder growled. The sky darkened, and a cold wind swept in. The trees swayed, branches whispering together. Jesse looked around, startled. Behind him, white mist slipped across the door, obscuring it.

Walt let out a soft whimper.

"Hey," Jesse said, trying not to sound as nervous as he felt. "It's okay. Everything's gonna be okay. Just let me in. Let me help you."

"I can't," he said. "I _can't._ "

The wind picked up, lashing the trees. A bright blue lightning bolt arched down from the sky and struck a nearby tree. It fell, creaking, and crashed to the ground just yards away.

"Walt, come on! We've got to get out of here!" Jesse lunged forward, prepared to scoop him up and carry him out by force if he had to—but as soon as his outstretched hands touched the air above the circle, pain seared through him. An impact jolted him to his bones, and then he was flying backwards. He landed on the ground, splayed on his back, his chest empty and hurting. For a terrifying few seconds he couldn't draw breath, then air rushed into his lungs, and he gasped like a beached fish. Shaking, he sat up and stared dazedly at his hands. The palms were scorched black, the flesh cracked and bleeding. The burns extended up his arms in long, red lines of blisters. His sleeves had been partially incinerated.

Walt was huddled in a tiny ball on the ground, face hidden against his knees, still rocking back and forth, faster and faster. "I'm sorry," he whispered. "I'm sorry, I'm sorry."

The door was no longer visible. The mist was closing in, swirling around them.

Jesse's hands throbbed. Slowly, he curled them into fists. It hurt like a bitch, like his hands had been dipped in acid. The pain was a stark reminder of the danger.

This was Walt's mind. He had all the power here. He could probably fry Jesse like a gnat in a bug zapper, if he wanted. But Jesse didn't believe that he would. This—this was theatrics designed to scare him off, because this was what Walt did whenever he was feeling vulnerable. He pushed people away.

Jesse wouldn't let him. Not this time.

He rose to his feet and walked back toward the circle. The wind rushed around him, howling in his ears, whipping the mist into shapes like rearing demons. The sky had gone totally black. More lightning arched and flashed through the sky, dancing between clouds. "Walt," he said, his voice firm, "look at me."

Walt kept his face downcast, his body curled into itself like a pillbug. But the wind died down, and the thunder quieted. "This is where I belong," Walt said. He spoke softly, mechanically; his voice seemed to be coming from somewhere far away. "I deserve this."

"Bullshit."

"Just go." His voice cracked. "You got out, didn't you? You're free. So why did you come here?"

Jesse's hands still burned, and the air was filled with electricity; he could taste it on the tip of his tongue, like copper, could hear it crackling.

Why _had_ he come here? There was nothing keeping Walt in this prison except his own stubbornness. He could leave anytime.

But Jesse knew it wasn't that simple. He knew because he'd been in this place a thousand times-this endless cycle of self-loathing, kicking himself, blotting out the pain any way he could, then despising himself even more for his cowardice. It was like one of those paper finger traps, where the harder you pulled to get free, the tighter it got.

He drew in a deep breath. "There's something they told me in rehab. Guilt and self-hatred, it doesn't accomplish anything. Punishing yourself, it's just another way to avoid real change. You have to move forward. Isn't that what you were always telling me? That we shouldn't focus on the darkness of the past?"

Walt remained where he was, huddled in a tiny ball.

"That's who you are, Walt. You're a survivor. Maybe you made a lot of bad choices, but you kept going. You kept _trying._ So where's all that willpower now? Where's the guy who went head to head with Tuco and got him to pay up? Where's the crazy, brilliant, ruthless son of a bitch who outsmarted Gus Fring, who built his own meth empire from a box of supplies from a high school chemistry lab?"

Still, no response.

"You are the smartest person I've ever known. You barged into my world and turned it inside out and put me through some of the most terrifying experiences of my life, but I let you do it, and I kept coming back to you, because I wanted to see where you'd go and what you'd do next. I wanted to be part of it. Even when I hated your guts, I respected you. I wanted you to respect _me_. You saved our skins more times than I can count, and even when it seemed like there was no possible way we could get out of our latest fuck-up, you _made_ a way. You made me like chemistry, for God's sake. But you can't step out of that circle and walk over to the doors standing _right there?_ "

The silence stretched between them. And then, finally, Walt spoke. His voice was a little boy's, but his tone was all too adult—weary, defeated. "It was all fake, Jesse. Everything you saw in me. I wasn't moving forward. I was running. I didn't even know how to stop. And it never worked. Deep down, I was still scared. I've always been scared, for as long as I can remember."

"Who isn't? You think _I_ wasn't scared? I never knew how to deal with life either. But shutting yourself away from the people who want to help you sure as hell doesn't work."

Still, he didn't look up, but his tone took on a cold, stubborn slant that Jesse recognized all too well. "I don't deserve help. And I don't need you trying to convince me that I do. I know what kind of person I am."

"It's not about what you _deserve._ That's the whole point of love. You don't have to deserve it. It's not something you can earn. It's free."

Slowly, Walt raised his head. A tiny furrow appeared between his brows.

"I can't force you to leave," Jesse said quietly. "But I'm telling you, now-you can, if you want to. You don't have to keep punishing yourself. You can walk out anytime."

"And what if I don't?"

"Then I'll stay here with you."

Silence hung over the empty playground. There was only a faint, lonely wind, still ghosting through the treetops.

 _"Why?"_ Walt whispered.

"Because that's what I choose. I'm not going anywhere if I have to leave you behind."

Walt drew in a deep, shaky breath and slowly raised one hand. He clenched it into a fist…then brought it down, scattering the ring of Tinker Toys. There was a jolt. A shock wave rippled outward from the broken circle, vibrating through the ground under Jesse's feet.

And then six-year-old Walt lurched to his feet, ran toward Jesse, and flung his arms around his legs, hugging them tightly. It caught Jesse off guard; he staggered a little and nearly toppled over, then managed to get his balance at the last minute.

He wrapped his arms around Walt. Pain flared along the nerves in his wounded hands. He ignored it. "It's okay. I got you. I'm not letting go."

"You promise?" Walt whispered, hiding his face against Jesse's stomach.

"I promise."

Jesse held him until his rapid breathing slowed. He noticed that the sharp burn of his injuries had died down to a dull ache. When he raised one hand, he saw that the bleeding cracks in his palm had closed. The red patches were shrinking. He was too relieved to question it.

Walt lightly touched the back of his wrist. "Does it hurt?"

"Nah. Come on. Let's get out of here."

They started to walk toward the doors. Walt hung back, clutching at Jesse's pant leg, biting his lower lip. "I...I don't know if-"

Jesse crouched and scooped Walt up into his arms.

Walt squirmed like a cat. "Put me down!" There was a hint of the old, prideful indignation in his voice. "I'm not a child."

Jesse smiled. It was funny to hear him say that in his little kid voice. And, he had to admit, it was satisfying to be able to pick up the great Heisenberg. Weird, how easy it was. He was so light. "Is it really so awful to have someone carry you?"

Walt hesitated. He glanced at the doors...then slipped his arms around Jesse's neck and held on. "No," he murmured. "It's not that bad."

Jesse carried him into the elevator.

* * *

Walt felt himself rising slowly, like a bubble to the surface of a pond. When he opened his eyes, his vision was blurry. He realized his glasses had fallen off. Fumbling, he picked them up off the floor and slid them into place. He was lying on his back on the floor of a vast, luminous white room.

"Hey, Mr. White." A familiar face smiled down at him. "We made it."

"Jesse," he whispered.

Jesse extended a hand. Dazed, Walt took it, and his partner helped him to his feet.

Walt looked down at his own hands, turning them over. They were a man's hands once again, lined and grooved with age. "Where are we?"

"Hard to explain. It's like a cosmic waiting room, kind of."

His memories of what had just transpired were dim. He'd fallen asleep and had a dream, hadn't he? A dream of being six years old again, in the playground at his old school. Jesse had been there, and there had been despair and pain and terror and then overwhelming relief...a feeling of warmth and safety, peace and lightness, like floating. Yes, he remembered. Jesse had picked him up and carried him. The thought brought considerably less shame than he would have expected.

Altogether, he felt amazingly _good-_ healthier than he could remember feeling for a long, long time. The pain of the cancer was gone, but it was more than that. It was as if he could breathe fully after a lifetime of having iron bands wrapped around his ribs. There was a sense that he had...surrendered, in some way.

But maybe that was the wrong word. He had not given up. He had let go. Walt had never understood the difference, until now.

"You came back for me," he said.

"Of course I did," Jesse said. "You're my partner."

Walt was not a spiritual man. Chemistry was the closest thing he'd ever had to a religion. But in that moment, he knew the meaning of salvation—undeserved, outside of his own control, given for the sake of being given. He tried to speak, but his throat had tightened, cutting off his voice.

"Hey…" Jesse's voice, soft with concern. He reached out and touched his arm. "Walt?"

He struggled for a few more seconds before he managed to whisper the words, "Thank you."

It was ironic, he thought. He had been so intent on rescuing Jesse, so convinced it was his job to shepherd his young partner. But in the end, Jesse was the one who had lifted him up out of hell.

Or maybe they had saved each other.

"Well done," said a voice.

Walt tensed and looked up. When he saw the figure standing in front of them, his chest turned hollow. "Gale."

"It's cool," Jesse said quickly. "He's on our side."

Gale inclined his head toward Walt. There was an odd, almost mischievous smile on his face. "I must admit, I'm impressed. I wasn't entirely sure you could do it. But you came through, both of you. It's good to see you again, Walt."

Walt opened his mouth, but he couldn't find words. "Gale…I…"

Gale held up a hand. "No apologies, please. They aren't necessary. Just follow me. There will be plenty of time to talk later. And we have a _lot_ to talk about." He turned and began to walk.

They followed, Walt still floating in a cloud of numb astonishment. None of this made sense. This place was beyond anything he could fathom. He felt humbled, small and insignificant. And yet, strangely, he wasn't afraid.

Their footsteps echoed through the vast emptiness as Gale led them. The room stretched on and on; it was cool, pristine, unearthly. Eventually, they reached a wall, and in the wall was a small, simple wooden door.

After you," Gale said.

Walt and Jesse looked at each other. Walt's heart hammered against the wall of his chest, and he saw his own uncertainty reflected in Jesse's eyes. Through that door lay the unknown; a world beyond equations, beyond chemistry, beyond flesh and blood and money.

"No matter what's on the other side," Jesse said, "we stay together."

Walt nodded. "Partners," he agreed.

"Fifty-fifty."

"Always."

Jesse opened the door. Beyond was light, pure and warm.

Walt took his hand. And they stepped through, together.

-The End


End file.
